Quotes from Jane Urquhart

His mother had become like an ocean to the boy, vast and unknowable, with faraway shorelines he could never see, could not even imagine from where he stood but that he nevertheless sensed were vivid and real.

Racism is a destructive and artificially-manufactured element in the collective human psyche designed to fragment the natural desire of human beings to know and love one another

Get drunk, Austin, have a love affair. It would be a tragedy to die and discover that you hadn't completely used up your body.

Art is a kind of mining, he said. The artist a variety of prospector searching for the sparkling silver of meaning in the earth.

Longing for something that you once had is a mistake because the pictures in your mind are never the same as whatever it is you are longing for.

Get drunk, Austin, have a love affair. It would be a tragedy to die and discover that you hadn't completely used up your body.

This was the way it was going to be then, this road she was going to have to walk. She would always be thinking of him so that he would be beside her even when he wasn't there, making her joyous or miserable, but always, always controlling the colour of her days.

When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction.

And those you never forgive you find impossible to forget. — Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter (McClelland & Stewart, 1997)

I don't know what I mean, but I know I believe it.

The Arctic is the landscape of the self, of the naked soul. It is what the inner landscape looks like when everything beyond the self has been discarded.

Any work of art, said her grandfather,must achieve sainthood before we set it free to roam in the world.

What do you do with everything that is cut away? she asked Tilman, thinking now about the negative space of stone sculpture, the stone that is discarded, thinking too about how she had thrown away huge pieces of her own early life...

Old Eileen leaned forward in her chair, thrusting her face closer to the child who had been gradually approaching her. Where is the centre of the world? she abruptly demanded. Esther stood silently in front of her, holding onto a book she had forgotten to put on a table. She did not know the answer to the riddle. The place where you stand, Old Eileen said. The place where you stand is the centre of the world.

If she had been asked to describe him, she would have said that he was the exact spot where the sea touches land, the precise moment of the final reach of the surf. That was the place and time of him. She would forever, then, seek shorelines and beaches.

They represent the most dangerous kind of shape changers: those who cannot see, because of darkness beyond the gesture of the moment

The lake was a shield of beaten brass flung down in the valley under a full sun.

A silence slipped in through the door and inhabited the indoor space. Then it slipped out again.

The stern marble faces of these men can still be seen in the graveyards of Hamilton, though they have become soiled over the years from the soot produced by the factories that made them rich enough to afford tombs of this nature.

The string of bright beads, he had told her, were to remind her of the twenty brightest days they had spent together, and a promise of twenty more, and then twenty more, infinitely. Even in old age she would be able to call to mind the sound of the word infinitely, the music it made, coloured by the slight Irish accent in his mouth - a word that whether shouted, sung, or spoken, sounded always like a tender whisper.

And the odd thing was, she was beautiful then. It was her awakening, her... recovery that made her beautiful. After that she just shone.

I looked back over that field, and all across it you could see spider webs. This was quite amazing to me as I had just ploughed the whole field that day. A testimonial to the spiders' indestructability, I'd say.

Hardly anybody, he said, understands how essential shit is to holding things together.

fierce lonely