Jane Urquhart Quotes & Sayings

And the odd thing was, she was beautiful then. It was her awakening, her ... recovery that made her beautiful. After that she just shone. — Jane Urquhart

Art is a kind of mining," he said. "The artist a variety of prospector searching for the sparkling silver of meaning in the earth. — Jane Urquhart

Get drunk, Austin, have a love affair. It would be a tragedy to die and discover that you hadn't completely used up your body. — Jane Urquhart

I don't know what I mean, but I know I believe it. — Jane Urquhart

Longing for something that you once had is a mistake because the pictures in your mind are never the same as whatever it is you are longing for. — Jane Urquhart

Old Eileen leaned forward in her chair, thrusting her face closer to the child who had been gradually approaching her. "Where is the centre of the world?" she abruptly demanded. Esther stood silently in front of her, holding onto a book she had forgotten to put on a table. She did not know the answer to the riddle. "The place where you stand," Old Eileen said. The place where you stand is the centre of the world. — Jane Urquhart

When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction. — Jane Urquhart

Someday," Joseph said to his granddaughter, "someday something will happen and you will want to go back to the carving. You won't be able to prevent yourself; that's just the way it is. The world always somehow takes us back to the chisel. Something happens and we have to respond. — Jane Urquhart

Racism is a destructive and artificially-manufactured element in the collective human psyche designed to fragment the natural desire of human beings to know and love one another — Jane Urquhart

This was the way it was going to be then, this road she was going to have to walk. She would always be thinking of him so that he would be beside her even when he wasn't there, making her joyous or miserable, but always, always controlling the colour of her days. — Jane Urquhart

The lake was a shield of beaten brass flung down in the valley under a full sun. — Jane Urquhart

As the sky behind the Eddy Match Factory across the river filled with light, the steady timbre of the water and rapids became sentences spoken in a soft female voice and Eileen accepted, without surprise, the presence of her mother's lost words. So this is what it is to be away, her mother's voice told her. You are never present where you stand. You see the polished dishes in your kitchen cupboard throwing back the hearth light, but they know neither you nor the meals you have taken from their surfaces. Your flagstones are a series of dark lakes that you scour, and the light that touches and alters them sends you unspeakable messages. Waves arch like mantles over everything that burns. Each corner is a secret and your history is a lie. — Jane Urquhart

The women of this family leaned towards extremes. — Jane Urquhart

The string of bright beads, he had told her, were to remind her of the twenty brightest days they had spent together, and a promise of twenty more, and then twenty more, infinitely. Even in old age she would be able to call to mind the sound of the word "infinitely", the music it made, coloured by the slight Irish accent in his mouth - a word that whether shouted, sung, or spoken, sounded always like a tender whisper. — Jane Urquhart

What do you do with everything that is cut away? she asked Tilman, thinking now about the negative space of stone sculpture, the stone that is discarded, thinking too about how she had thrown away huge pieces of her own early life ... — Jane Urquhart

Any work of art," said her grandfather,"must achieve sainthood before we set it free to roam in the world. — Jane Urquhart

They represent the most dangerous kind of shape changers: those who cannot see, because of darkness beyond the gesture of the moment — Jane Urquhart

Hardly anybody," he said, "understands how essential shit is to holding things together. — Jane Urquhart

She knew she was a purveyor of costume, of disguise, a fabricator of persona, one who touched only the protective surface, never the skin, the heart. She was beginning, as a consequence, to envy almost everyone she met, to envy their small preoccupations, their carefully kept account books, the way they stood on streetcorners talking about farm machinery, the weather, the price of a bag of oats, fully connected for the moment to these ordinary things. Her connection continually slipped downstream, against the current, toward the swiftly disappearing past. What beyond the most cursory, practical knowledge of fashion, had the present to do with her? — Jane Urquhart