Quotes from Sinclair Ross

It's like being lost, and coming on an old wagon trail. You don't know where it leads, how long or why it's been abandoned, but at least it's a trail.

It's an immense night out there, wheeling and windy. The lights on the street and in the houses against the black wetness, little unilluminating glints that might be painted on it. The town seems huddled together, cowering on a high tiny perch, afraid to move lest it topple into the wind.

Hypocrisy wears hard on a man who at heart isn't that way.

He never unbends to Paul completely anyway. I detect just the faintest air of condescension when they're together, the natural conviction of superiority that it seems a man of six foot three can't help feeling over a man just five foot seven and a half.

His eyes were narrowed as he spoke, bitten a little with perplexity at the uselessness of being right against the world.

This horse is good for him. Good for his self-respect. You can't ride a horse and feel altogether worthless, or be altogether convinced that society's little world is the last world.

A man's tragedy is himself, not the events that overtake him, and the same Main Street slight and condescension that put cloud over Philip for life, Steve is emerging from already and shaking off.

Life has proved bitter and deceptive to Philip because of the artist in him, because he has kept seeking a beauty and significance that isn't life's to give; but Steve is a shrewd little realist, who, given opportunity to meet life on its own terms, ought to make a fair success of it.

Sorry I didn't do better," he said. "I'll have to come back another year and have another lesson." I clenched my hands and clung hard to this promise that I knew he couldn't keep. I wanted to rebel against what was happening, against the clumsiness and crudity of life, but instead I stood quiet a moment, almost passive, then wheeled away and carried his cornet to the buggy. (Cornet at Night)

It's only since we've had Steve with us that I've realized how much of himself a man has to give before he's really possessed. I used to think it was possession because we lived together as man and wife. I didn't know how little it can amount to wanting a woman at night, putting up with her in the daytime.

Religion and art [...] are almost the same thing anyway. Just different ways of taking a man out of himself, bringing him to the emotional pitch that we can ecstasy or rapture.

What exactly she was thinking I never knew. Perhaps of the crop and the whole day's stoking lost. Perhaps of the stranger who had come with his cornet for a day, and then as meaninglessly gone again. For she had been listening too, and she may have understood. A harvest, however lean, is certain every year; but a cornet at night is golden only once. (Cornet at Night)

He had been bewildered by it once, her caring for a dull-witted fellow like him; then assured at last of her affection he had relaxed against it gratefully, unsuspecting it might ever be less constant than his own.

For his presumption, his misunderstanding of what had been only a momentary weakness, instead of angering quickened her, roused from latency and long disuse all the instincts and resources of her femininity. She felt eager, challenged. Something was at hand that hitherto had always eluded her, even in the early days in John, something vital, beckoning, meaningful.

Or perhaps, the thought seized her, perhaps instead of his smile it was she who had changed. She who, in the long, wind-creaked silence, had emerged from the increment of codes and loyalties to her real, unfettered self. She who now felt his air of appraisal as nothing more than an understanding of the unfulfilled woman that until this moment had lain within her brooding and unadmitted, reproved out of consciousness by the insistence of an outgrown, routine fidelity.

Ross's style is always beautifully matched to his material – spare, lean, honest, no gimmicks, and yet in its very simplicity setting up continuing echoes of the mind. (Margaret Laurence's Afterword)

she too had faith in basic human goodness; still where her Sonny was concerned, there were certain types at which she thought it wise to draw the line.

For in the country, farm or town, you always know. No one's just there. There's always a source, a why and wherefore.

Her hair was done, her lips touched up. A look of competence, decision.

You can have a slouch in your mind as well as you back.

Leaving a little puddle isn't what counts. It's making it in the big one.

It's all a hold up anyway-- money, body, brains. Do you think anybody's ever satisfied with what he's got a right to?

As God as my judge, I don't know where I went wrong!

There must have been a moment when the key clicked and turned-- a moment of decision, involving me-- but when I go back I find only the door, fist closed, then open, never the act of opening it.