Josephine Hart Quotes & Sayings

What really makes us is beyond grasping. It's way beyond knowing. We give in to love ... because it gives us some sense of what is unknowable. Nothing else matters, not at the end. — Josephine Hart

They say that childhood forms us, that those early influences are the key to everything. Is the peace of the soul so easily won? Simply the inevitable result of a happy childhood. What makes childhood happy? Parental harmony? Good health? Security? Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life? Like leading a lamb to the slaughter. — Josephine Hart

We learn from tragedy. Slowly. — Josephine Hart

Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision
the ability to select the elements vital to survival, while ignoring the great truths. — Josephine Hart

Always recognize the foces that will shape my life. I let them do their work. Sometimes they tear through my life like a hurricane. Sometimes they simply shift the ground under me, so that I stand on different earth, and something or someone has been swallowed up. I steady myself, in the earthquate. I lie down, and let the hurricane pass over me. I never fight. Afterwards I look around me, and I say, 'Ah, so this at least is left for me. And that dear person has also survived.' I quietly inscribe on the stone tablet of my heart the name which has gone forever. Th inscription is a thing of agony. Then I start on my way again. — Josephine Hart

Men and women find all sorts of ways to be together, all sorts of ways. Yours was high and dangerous. Most of us stay on the lower paths. — Josephine Hart

I am prepared to accept from others their own version of reality. I think it is a basic freedom really, to create one's own reality from whatever truths are available. — Josephine Hart

The passion that transforms life, and art, did not seem to be mine. But in all essentials, my life was a good performance. — Josephine Hart

The day then trapped me in its iron bars of phone calls and meetings, letters to read, letters to write, decisions to make, promises to break. — Josephine Hart

And if I was bewildered through those decades, totally bewildered, so was the country I came from. The majority, what was the phrase? 'Condemn utterly what is happening, this barbarity.' But that's all we did. Condemn. And march. But not often enough. — Josephine Hart

We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep. All this we say, as we sleepwalk our time through years of days and nights. We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never-ending. Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday. — Josephine Hart

She was the split-second experience that changes everything.; the car smash; the letter we shouldn't have opened; the lump in the breast or groin; the blinding flash. On my well-ordered stage-set the lights were up, and maybe at last I was waiting in the wings. — Josephine Hart

Warriors, in the ancient world, put their souls away for safe keeping during times of danger. I'd put mine away and didn't want strangers to search for it. I might lose it. I'd watched those who'd thrown their souls in front of strangers and their bemusement when it was handed back to them, marked and scratched. Sometimes they didn't even get it back. Well, they'd been careless. Some of them wept, of course. But it was too late. It's murderously difficult to get your soul back, in any condition, once you've let it slip away from you. There's no search party willing to go out in all weathers to find your lost soul. — Josephine Hart

The majority do not desire the world - knowing on some primitive level that it disappoints. They are quite content to let the blind few pursue their path to wisdom. And to watch those trapped by genius forced to sacrifice themselves, and those trapped by talent to emulate them. Much better to be in the audience, watching the actors find the surprise ending. — Josephine Hart

The weapon of memory, turned on the self, is an apocalyptic sword. — Josephine Hart

For why trap what is already trapped? It is only in flight that we know the freedom of the bird — Josephine Hart

Lucky people should hide. Pray the days of wrath do not visit their home. — Josephine Hart

Very odd, old age. Always knew it would happen, if I was lucky. I just didn't expect it so soon. — Josephine Hart

When boys called Bob and Bono would bring their own wild-rhythm celebration and the world would fall down in worshipful hallelujahs as it again acknowledged Ireland's capacity to create missionaries. So what if they were "the boys in the band"? They sang from a pulpit, an enormous pulpit looking down on a congregation that would knock your eyes out. A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that had produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we're teachers, missionaries. — Josephine Hart

Sissy,travelling down the road with you was all I have ever wanted in life.
The beauty of it! No matter how long this takes, I'll wait. — Josephine Hart

Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable. — Josephine Hart

I want to know what's wrong with loving someone for life? Even when they're dead? What exactly is wrong with that? Why should I put him away, out of my mind? Like he's out of fashion. Does no one love for ever any more? Is no one built for the long road? — Josephine Hart

The miraculous intimacy we shared did not have the time to generate into resentful emotional bondage — Josephine Hart

There was a full moon in the starless sky. I thought how rarely I had noticed such things. Some deep failure of the soul perhaps. An inherited emptiness. A nothingness passed from generation to generation. A flaw in the psyche, discovered only by those who suffer by it. — Josephine Hart

Memory is never pure. And recollection is always coloured by the life lived since — Josephine Hart

Was my sin basically one of untruthfulness? Or, more likely, one of cowardice? But the liar knows the truth. The coward knows his fear and runs away. — Josephine Hart

Television ... the new gladiatorial arena. — Josephine Hart

Where would we be without it, memory? Well, it'll never die here. Never in this country. We feed it too well. — Josephine Hart

There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. — Josephine Hart

We are here to add to the sum of human goodness. To prove the thing exists. — Josephine Hart

She's always loved writers, even more than the books I think. They're like personal friends to her. — Josephine Hart

Life is usually loved more than our most sacred love. In that knowledge lies the beginning of our cruelty and of our survival. — Josephine Hart

A concealed truth, that's all a lie is. Either by omission or commission we never do more than obscure. The truth stays in the undergrowth, waiting to be discovered. — Josephine Hart

All damaged people are dangerous. Survival makes them so.' 'Why?' 'Because they have no pity. They know what others can survive, as they did. — Josephine Hart

Children are the great gamble. From the moment they are born, our helplessness increases. Instead of being ours to mould and shape after our best knowledge and endeavour, they are themselves. From their birth they are the centre of our lives, and the dangerous edge of existence. — Josephine Hart

Time, for a man who has never truly felt a second of it, it not a great sacrifice — Josephine Hart

My mother insured that a life of petty facts and dutiful farming was kept at bay by her passionate intensity, which nurtured the essential dreaminess of his nature — Josephine Hart

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place. — Josephine Hart

To appear unambitious amongst the ambitious is to invite loathing or fear. To be in the game, but not playing with intent to win, is to be the enemy. — Josephine Hart

We do have choice, but not without some agony. — Josephine Hart

Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive. — Josephine Hart

Those who do not have imaginary conversations do not love. — Josephine Hart

Poetry contains almost all you need to know about life. — Josephine Hart