Jo Baker Quotes

Life was, Mrs. Hill had come to understand, a trial by endurance, which everybody, eventually, failed.

Too much time spent with books had not fitted her to be easy with herself, and other people.

The room was dull now, and meaningless, with the young ladies gone from it. They were both lovely, almost luminous. And Sarah was, she knew, as she slipped along the servants' corridor, and then up the stairs to the attic to hang her her new dress on the rail, just one of the many shadows that ebbed and tugged at the edges of the light.

He nodded them a good evening, but instead unhitched the horses and brought them back to a trough in the Market Square. When they had drunk, breaking the moon into shards and ripples, he led them back to the coach, to wait. There

It was not that long ago that dinner had meant swallowing down whatever you could get your filthy hands on ... Dinner meant something different here. It meant half a day's work for two women. It mean polished crystal and silver, it meant a change of dress for the diners and a special suit of clothes for the servants to serve it up in. Here, dinner meant delay; it meant extending, with all the complexities of preparation and all those rituals of civility, the gap between hunger and its satisfaction. Here, now, it seemed that hunger itself might be relished, because its cessation was guaranteed; there always was - there always would be - meat and vegetables and dumplings and cakes and pies and plates and forks and pleases and thank yous, and endless plates of bread and butter.

Sarah, in the crush, was able to study Miss Lucas's face discreetly, she wondered what it was like to know that you were to be married, that you would have a home, an income, that you were set up for life. To have achieved all this simply by agreeing to put up with one particular man until he died.

Words had become overnight just little coins, insignificant and unfreighted, to be exchanged for ribbons, buttons, for an apple or an egg.

Because he wanted nothing from her; this was a generous, expansive feeling, unattached to the possibility of gratification; it was the simple happiness that came from knowing that one particular person was alive in the world

The fields studded with sheep.

I would ask if you miss me like I miss you, so that there is not another spot in all the world that seems to mean anything at all, but where you are.

Perhaps it was not an easy thing, to be so entirely happy. Perhaps it was actually quite a fearful state to live in
the knowledge that one had achieved a complete success.

James had no intentions; he could not afford to have any; he could not afford to rope another person to his saddle. All he could do was keep his head down and get his work done.

Sarah wondered what it could be like, to live like this - life as a country dance, where everything is lovely, and graceful, and ordered, and every single turn is preordained, and not a foot may be set outside the measure. Not like Sarah's own out-in-all-weathers haul and trudge, the wind howling and blustery, the creeping flowers in the hedgerows, the sudden sunshine.

She wished the journey was over, but she did not want to arrive.

Jane Austen's work was my first experience of grown-up literature, and has supplied a lifetime of pleasure: it's the only book that, as an adult, I re-read.

We do have rules here. We have responsibilities towards each other. This is not a free-for-all.

Other, dryer customers came and went, having just stepped out of their conveyances or popped down the street from their houses in the town. They left their umbrellas dripping at the door, and looked at her with that particular combination of sympathy and amusement that the soaked seem always to elicit in the dry.

And yet, and yet, the feeling still could not quite be quelled: there was also the fact of her, herself. Would she, at some time, have the chance to care for her own things, her own comforts, her own needs, and not just for other people's? Could she one day have what she wanted, rather than rely on the glow of other people's happiness to keep her warm?

It didn't do to get dependent. It didn't do to get attached.

He stares now at the three words he has written.They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it; jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can't move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It's not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.

It was a thought, that. Not to attach yourself to a man, but to confront instead the open world, the wide fields of France and Spain, the ocean, anything. Not just to hitch a lift with the first fellow who looked as though he knew where he was going, but just to go.

Sarah was soon lugging pasteboard boxes, paper packages and rolled samples of wallpaper. She had seen all of this before: she had daydreamed it. It was all very fine, but it was not as lovely as the daydream, and the packages slithered and slipped from her grip, and a box dug into her side, and how could it be that one printed paper was so vitally, importantly lovely and another was entirely dismissable, or that any or that any of it really mattered so very much, or indeed at all?

Threads that drift alone will sometimes simply twine themselves together, without need for spindle or distaff: brought into each other's ambit, they bind themselves tight with the force of their own torsion. And this same torsion can, in the course of things, bundle the resulting cord back upon itself, ravelling it up into a skein, returning to the point of its beginning.

You have no idea at all yet what you can bear!

When she was a girl, and still growing, ravenous, whenever there had been a cake – a sponge cake, dusted with sugar, which Mrs Hill had conjured up out of eggs and flour and creamy butter – Sarah would never even let herself look at it, because she knew that it was not for her. Instead, she would carry it upstairs to be rendered into crumbs, and the crumbs lifted from the plate by a moistened Bennet finger, and the empty smeared plate carried back again. So Sarah would stare instead at the carpet underneath her feet, or at the painting of a horse with a strangely small head that hung at the end of the hall, or the rippled yellow curtains in the parlour, and would do her best not to breathe, not to inhale the scent of vanilla or lemon or almonds; even to glance at the cake was an impossible agony.
And for months, she realized, James had hardly looked at her at all.

Work was not a cure; it never had been: it simply grew a skin on despair, and crusted over it.

The ladies, who had condoled so thoroughly with her during her time of grief, found it rather more difficult to participate in her happiness, which takes a true and proper friend indeed.

Like a pebble dropped into a stream, his arrival had made a ripple in the surface of things. He'd felt that; he'd seen it in the way they looked at him, Sarah and Mrs. Hill and the little girl. But the ripples were getting fainter as they spread,