Quotes from Jude Morgan

Misery is home ground, and she has only ever made excursions into the far country of happiness.

The advantage of a head, or mind or brain, is that it will be a resource and support to you in life,' Lydia said crisply, 'while the heart is liable chiefly to cause you pain

Mary watched a bluebottle endlessly hammering inself against the window-glass, and saw there love as she knew it, a painful beating against nothingness.

There is no greater tyranny, Miss Rae, than convention

There was something in front of her, perhaps happiness: Mary hesitated, like someone in a fairy-tale being offered a tempting dish that might be poisoned. Was that it? Again she didn't know. She disapproved of fairy-tale. They were not rational.

It was perturbing to look long at your reflection: to realise that all the time you were there in the world, visible, undeniable

That is Mary: there are no suburbs to her personality: before you know it you are at her heart.

It was an impossibility, but Augusta lived quite comfortably with impossibilities.

I scarcely possess myself at all it seems to me - as if my self was mortgaged long ago - to whom I know not - the higher spirits, I would hope - but it may be, alas, the Devil. I pray not. But it would explain a good deal.

I do not know where my life has gone.

You will find in the end, my dear friend, that there is nothing more oppressie than freedom.

Perhaps we should always say that instead of 'old'. How gone are you? I'm thirty years gone.

Some people have to carry a mirror and watch themselves living to feel they're alive at all.

Freedom is a thing you make', he says, with sudden vehemence. 'You maki it by what you do. That's about the only thing that is left us in this world.

There is the everyday truth of things, and there is the ideal. We must somehow live between them.

The only thing worse than constantly seeing what you can't have is constantly seeing what you must have.

Under the greenwood tree, who something something me", tum-te-tum the weather,' Tom remarked. 'Shocking memory for poetry.

the sum of unhappiness is always greater than the parts

Does this mean that even in a deep dreamless sleep, the mind is in some degree active - yet without us being aware of it? Thus the mind is not conscious of the mind? Have we a divided mind, then, or even two? And if it is disturbance that makes a man get up in his sleep and walk, then do the emotions persist even in sleep? But without awareness, this would suggest the emotions are merely a bodily expression like yawning or needing to make water.

It is very hard, I know, when you're young, to remember that there is such a thing as the rest of your life.

How childish lovers can seem - perhaps that is why love is so alarming, it reduces us to children again, little and vulnerable and powerless in a great world we do not understand.

she has come to the conclusion that a certain amount of lying, like the priming of a pump, is necessary to keep life going. Absolute honesty would bring everything to a shattering halt.

But it only passes through her mind, and then, like a dusty book consigned to a shelf, it joins the vast sad library of things left unsaid.

The world was a broken mirror, fractured into impossibilities.