3 Quotes & Sayings By Jean Stafford

Jean Stafford was born in Smyrna, Tennessee, on June 12, 1914. She published her first poem at the age of seven. In 1930, she graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of Tennessee, but left college after a year. She married a fellow poet named John Stafford in New York City in 1935 and together they became the parents of two sons Read more

In 1948, she published her first novel, The Dark Room. The book's heroine, a young woman named Merry Clayton, was modeled after Jean Stafford herself. It was this novel that led to her receiving an invitation to join the famed Algonquin Round Table in 1949.

Since then, she has written more than eighty books for adults and children.

1
To her own heart, which was shaped exactly like a valentine, there came a winglike palpitation, a delicate exigency, and all the fragrance of all the flowery springtime love affairs that ever were seemed waiting for them in the whisky bottle. To mingle their pain their handshake had promised them, was to produce a separate entity, like a child that could shift for itself, and they scrambled hastily toward this profound and pastoral experience. Jean Stafford
2
It never occurs to her that she will not be a writer and only occasionally does it occur to her, depressingly, that she is going to grow into a woman, not a man. Jean Stafford