Gail Jones Quotes

He could smell the lavender scent of the powder she dabbed under her arms, and his own fluids, and hers pungently intermingling.

Unmediated joy was nowadays unfashionable.

She imagined the trade in meanings as a kind of game, in which tokens shaped like mahjong tiles were exchanged and switched. Signs moved from one world to another, clacked together, made new sequences. A man in Bolshevik Russia became virtually Chinese; a world unfolded from a paper envelope. This game existed in the borderless continent of her father's head. She could see how he concentrated: 'cher' in Russian, 'neve' in Italian, 'snow' in English, until he arrived at the sound 'xue', and then the character: the radical symbol for rain, the strokes for frozen, the little block of marks that revealed the transition from alphabets to ideograms.

Like so much in the centre, it was under construction or reconstruction. Scaffolding, cranes, the temporary business of architects and workmen, the portable toilets, the short-term fencing, the crash-barriers and the skips. Rubble, more rubble. There was a history of Berlin to be written on the topic of rubble.

Famously contemptuous of the art of photography, Marcel Proust, of all men, would have understood that the face I am seeking is in the end unfixable. People never stop changing position in relation to us. In the imperceptible but incessant movement of the world, we regard them as immobile in an instant of vision too brief for us to notice the moment which is propelling them. But we have only to select from our memories two pictures of them taken at different times, but similar enough for them not to change in themselves, at least not perceptibly and the difference between the two pictures is a gauge of the displacement they have undergone in relation to us. Even the dead are not immobile and dreams pay no homage to the absurd waking-myth of fixity.

Struggling with frozen expressions and tightly compressed lips. Everyone wore black padded jackets in a kind of mournful uniformity, and battled the same bladed wind that swept across the open spaces, their fists jammed into pockets, their heads resolutely down.

Camus had said in his 'Carnets' that the lives of others appear always, from the outside, to have a completion our own dismally lacks. Only when we understand this as a projection - that our lives, too, are unclosed and contingent - do we approach maturity. Alice felt immature. She felt that she was a spy in the cold.

Shifts within friendships happen in imperceptible increments. There is distance, then assurance. Misconjecture, caution, gradual convergence. So much depends on the respect accorded to vulnerability.

Alice looked at the sky and sniffed at the heavens. Night seemed to swallow her. It was true, then, her ancient, girlish understanding. Grief is like space walking. It is nothing terrestrial. Laws of gravity alter, and bodies tilt and float away.

Because we were stranded together and because I stuttered, we read. there is no refuge so private, no asylum more sane. There is no facility of voices captured elsewhere so entire and so marvellous. My tongue was lumpish and fixed, but in reading, silent reading, there was a release, a flight, a wheeling off into the blue spaces of exclamatory experience, diffuse and improbable, gloriously homeless. All that was solid melted into air, all that was air reshaped, and gained plausibility. (p. 43)

They had been mistaken, it seemed, in seeking other tongues. Languages were not a special capacity, as she had once imagined, but incautious assent to the wrong kinds of meanings. A

It was hard to imagine the icy water thawed and re-sealing, or the sky returning to a lively blue. She had a sense of contraction, of huddling against the weather. Later, it figured in her mind as Stalinist classicism, the wind tunnel of the vast and inhuman Karl-Marx-Allee, and the shapes of people in padded jackets bending against the cruel air. A scene from Eisenstein, perhaps, with a gelid lens and the special effects of monumental vision, swollen by an aerial view and historical misery. Black outlines on white snow, impersonality, extinguishment. Exaggeration of this kind was irresistible. In that early, fierce cold, Berliners coped better.

The dignity and sobriety of old public buildings, their temple facades, would be assaulted and covered over by indiscriminate modernity; that new buildings, more severely efficient, would eventually replace them.

Friends are an intersection. A route back to the world.