Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Jessie Burton

Quote by Jessie Burton

Work

The Miniaturist

In this historical fiction, a newlywed woman moves to Amsterdam and discovers a series of miniature rooms that mirror her life in unsettling ways. The story delves into the complexities of marriage, the social hierarchy of the time, and the mysterious forces at play in her new home. more

Author

Jessie Burton
Jessie Burton

Jessie Burton is a British author born in 1982. Her works are known for historical novels and fictional stories, which have won her a wide audience. more

You May Also Like

“What people think of you is only what they think of themselves. They look at you and see the maladies, the faults they've been carrying within themselves for the longest time. And they identified each flaw they found exactly because of this familiarity and acquaintance with their very own symptoms. How else did they recognize them in you?”

“Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable [...]. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on a such footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?”

“Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even it if goes wrong, it lives.”