Quotes from Gail Jones

Friends are an intersection. A route back to the world.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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

I was employed by an agency. Hikikomori agency. Parents paid the agency to find ways to get their sons back into the world. For many we were what you call in English "the last resort": the parents had tried pets, Shinto priests, bribes, threats. 'I was a very good rental sister – I had a high success rate. The fact that I dressed as a goth Lolita helped,

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,

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.

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.

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.

snow had wondrously returned. It pleased her to see anew the draped quality in the air, the muslin white descending, the animation, the plenitude. The symbol suggested itself – that there might be a white-washing now, and a more complete covering over. Snow is consolation, she thought; snow is this padding and cladding, this lush erasure of signs. She was surprised at how rested and serene she felt.

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.

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.