Quotes from Joan Lindsay

Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.

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.

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

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.

Nobody can be held responsible for the pranks of destiny.

The weeping elm at the window was murmurous with gossiping doves.

Everything if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete – the ragged nest, Marion's torn muslin skirts fluted like a nautilus shell, Irma's ringlets framing her face in exquisite wiry spirals – even Edith, flushed and childishly vulnerable in sleep.

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

Marion Quade, the only member of the class to take Pythagoras in her stride, was a favourite pupil, in the sense that a savage who understands a few words of the language of a shipwrecked sailor is a favourite savage.

Even as a little girl, Irma Leopold had wanted above all things to see everyone happy with the cake of their choice. Sometimes it became an almost unbearable longing, as when she had looked down at Mademoiselle asleep on the grass this afternoon.

Sometimes just to look at Miranda's calm oval face and straight corn-yellow hair gave her a sharp little stab of pleasure.

Except for those people over there with the wagonette we might be the only living creatures in the whole world,' said Edith, airily dismissing the entire animal kingdom at one stroke.

As always, in matters of surpassing human interest, those who knew nothing whatever either at first or even second hand were the most emphatic in expressing their opinions; which are well known to have a way of turning into established facts overnight.

Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different "realities".

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.

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

Why is it, Miranda,' she whispered, 'that such a sweet pretty creature is a schoolteacher – of all dreary things in the world . . .?

There was a delicious freedom about the swift steady motion of the drag and even in the warm dusty air blowing up in their faces that set the passengers chirping and chattering like budgerigars.

He had just fixed his hose on to the nearest garden tap when he noticed an offensive smell which seemed to be coming from the direction of the hydrangeas. Before turning on the tap he thought he had better investigate or Cook would be kicking up a shine with a stink so close to the kitchen door.

He had been too busy with the autumn pruning the last few days to stop as he often did to admire the close growing hydrangea bushes, their dark glossy leaves crowned with clusters of deep blue flowers. Now to his annoyance he saw that one of the tallest and most handsome plants, in the back row, a few feet out from the wall directly below the tower, had been badly crushed and broken, the beautiful blue heads limp on their stalks.

At every step the prospect ahead grew more enchanting with added detail of crenellated crags and lichen-patterned stone. Now a mountain laurel glossy above the dogwood's dusty silver leaves, now a dark slit between two rocks where maidenhair fern trembled like green lace.

Mrs Cutler, who had taken an immediate fancy to the elegant French lady, now appeared with a tray of strawberries and cream.

And this we do for pleasure,' Greta McCraw muttered from the shadows, 'so that we may shortly be at the mercy of venomous snakes and poisonous ants . . . how foolish can human creatures be!

That night the mountain mist came rolling down from the pine forest and lingered far into the morning.