Gail Jones Quotes & Sayings

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. — Gail Jones

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. — Gail Jones

With a trampoline heart she saw the Bridge to her left: its modern shape, its optimistic uparching. Familiar from postcards and television commercials, here now, here-now, was the very thing itself, neat and enthralling. There were tiny flags on top and the silhouetted ant forms of people arduously climbing the steep bow. It looked stamped against the sky, as if nothing could remove it. It looked indelible. A coathanger, guidebooks said, but it was so much grander than this implied. — Gail Jones

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

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. — Gail Jones

In photographs taken from the sky, cities resembled circuit boards. It was no surprise, really, that there were sparky misfirings, dangerous connections. Even traffic, Alice concluded, set up a kind of static in the air, let loose vibrations and uncontainable agitation. Freighted with more than they could absorb, with city intentions, citizens moved in designs of inexplicable purpose. — Gail Jones

The men she had known at university, with their practised uncouthness, their masculine argumentation, the way they assumed ownership of the women they lassoed into their grasp. She had endured them, her series of clever boyfriends, who expected her to pick up their towels and edit their poor prose. They had all exemplified the modish paranoias of their age. They were conceited over-achievers and smugly privileged. It had been a relief to fly away, — Gail Jones

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. — Gail Jones

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. — Gail Jones

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. — Gail Jones

Unmediated joy was nowadays unfashionable. — Gail Jones

Friends are an intersection. A route back to the world. — Gail Jones

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) — Gail Jones

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. — Gail Jones

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. — Gail Jones

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 — Gail Jones