Joan Lindsay Quotes

She sat staring at the heavy curtains that shut out the gentle twilit garden, thinking how few things in life were un-muddled, firmly outlined as they were surely intended to be? One could organize, direct, plan each hour in advance and still the muddle persisted. Nothing in life was really water-tight, nothing secret, nothing secure.

Time - whether you are burning it up or falling in love or spreading it out thin in a dentist's waiting room - is a commodity that cannot be weighed out and measured by clocks.

Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.

Thinking's all right if you have the time for it.

Where were they going? What strange feminine secrets did they share in that last gay fateful hour?

Everything, if you could only see it clearly enough, like this, is beautiful and complete. Everything has its own perfection.

Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom recorded, whose secret flowerings breed peace and war, loves and hates, the crowning or uncrowning of heads.

Nobody can be held responsible for the pranks of destiny.