Elizabeth Harrower > Quotes

“For five days the city had wilted under a hard sky, sweltering in a temperature that stayed fixed in the middle nineties. Even at night there was no relief from the heat. Pyjamas and nighties stuck clammily to damp skin. Half-clad, self-pitying figures rose, exasperated by insomnia, to stumble through darkened rooms in search of a cooler plot than their bed, hoping that, all accidentally, they might waken any gross sleeper the house contained. Cold water ran hot from the taps, and the roads turned to tar.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, Down in the City

“The city, to her, meant a few particular blocks - the best blocks - lying together in a neat rectangle, linked by arcades and department stores; three streets one way, cut by four at right angles, bound at the top by gardens, self-enclosed at the bottom and either end. Three or four times a week she walked the streets of these blocks, smelt the coffee, the flowers, the rich expensive leather, the cosmetics.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, Down in the City

“Oh. Yes. He's very bright. But the world, poor world, was as over-burdened with cleverness as with stupidity, and in a sense (lacking this), did they not amount to the very same thing? Oh, he's clever, Clare thought, but who's good? Who's good? Who is good?”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“She thinks he represents security. She thinks he might change and be kind to her. She pities him; that enslaves her.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“So they had all had more troubles than she. Did that really make them superior? If two men were walking along the street and a brick fell on one, missing the other, did that make the injured one a better person?”
― Elizabeth Harrower

“Well, you know what men are. Anything new gets them in.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Life had agreed to find her useful. It knew, something knew, at last, that she was here. Anything was possible. Everything was true. People could indeed change out of recognition, permanently, between two breaths.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Where’s your female Einstein, your Rembrandt? Women! Why were all the Greek and Roman statues of men? Because male beauty is superior in every way”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Her creamy face, her large amber eyes, were impenetrable. She was like a park that had never once removed its Don’t Walk on the Grass signs. The black veil of her little hat pricked her daughters’ cheeks in turn, and their clothes brushed together.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“You can admire the way someone meets hard circumstances, but you can't admire him because of them.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“I can't see the world as a great hospital with us all nursing and pitying each other.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“The men of this tribe,’ the anthropologist had written in that book of Clare’s that she had skimmed one night, ‘the men of this tribe regard the act of sex as the ultimate insult to be inflicted on a woman. Having degraded their wives by using them thus, they hold them thereafter in the greatest contempt.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Listen. There are people who are saints, and temples thousands of years old, Laura, and camel trains crossing the deserts. Cities are broken to pieces, and people are climbing mountains and making pilgrimages to Mecca. There’s beauty and terror and so much more than we know. Nothing is this small.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“social life—but what it turned out to be like was waiting at a bus stop, a grimy bus stop with grit and traffic tearing past.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Brought together as haphazardly as sardines in a net, as slippery and indifferent, she and her associates parted almost without noticing they did.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Some suffering must be clean compared with this, she thought. There was collusion here. There was nothing not depraved, perverted. There was no feeling of sufficient grace to earn the august name of suffering. And yet, she thought, I think we are probably very unhappy.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“in old times, whole communities used the method of passive resistance to redress a grievance. The technique was to sit motionless in a public place, without food and exposed to the weather, until the ruler agreed to the people’s demands. Sometimes, when he was particularly tyrannical, his subjects would desert the land, leaving the ruler to live in loneliness and mend his ways. In ancient India it was considered the duty of a wise man to abandon the kingdom when all methods of weaning a king from bad ways had failed.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“She knew about pity. Every day, every day, people walked on clouds of illusion. In that play at the Theatre Royal there was an actress who thought herself lovely, and who was plump and too old for the part. The leading actor meant to be brilliant and subtle, yet no single gesture or inflexion was inspired by talent. Clare’s heart was wrung. She suffered for them, loved and shielded them. When they bowed before the curtain and beamed at the applause, tears rolled down her cheeks. It was unbearable. They must never know.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Standing with bare feet and rumpled hair, they searched each other’s eyes with no difficulty for the first time for years, hardly noticing the boundary they had crossed in doing so, the minor miracle that allowed them to talk spontaneously without thought of profit or loss or hidden meaning. For out there in the grey of water, sky and land, there were dreadful clouds, a mad wind and hideous noises.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Evidently what happened at night was not carried forward like the petty cash balance to the next day. It would not have been proper.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“If she lied or acted all her life, no one she knew or ever had known would recognise the fact; alternatively, when she was herself, no one recognised that either.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Things, shapeless feelings, nightmarish and strange as mountains fighting, as landslides and ranges rising out of the sea, were best curtained off by the gold light of day. It was right to keep days and nights in separate compartments the way Felix did. Fortunately, fortunately, people had the sense not to go about in the mornings, in the streets, as if they guessed, or even (the thought really stunned her) had similar secrets.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“He loved to be so concentrated on.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“And it seemed that in finding the words for this question she had found them for all longing, and every question. For this meant everything. I want to be in the presence of someone good.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“This window was her look-out tower. All windows were part of the look-out tower. All of the girl looked out of the windows almost all of the time, wherever she happened to be, whatever she might be doing.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“What makes men superior is that they don’t—on the whole—stop functioning forever because of another person. They lack this built-in handicap, and are they lucky!”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“In some new way, since they had come to live in this house, it seemed to Clare that words, silences, gestures and the absence of gestures, being present, being absent, had all come to seem more meaningful than they were, to mean something other than what they meant. There was the effect of striking C natural and hearing B flat, so that the mind registered small disagreeable shocks constantly, as if a scientist with a new machine was playing tricks on it.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Perhaps this was the greatest difference of all between people? It did seem to be a very great difference. How odd—all to look like one and yet to be, in a sense, two species. This permanent awareness of what was so, regardless of her whims of the moment, regardless of what it would be pleasant to believe, or not pleasant, this solid bedrock was what she was, what she was about. What could there be in its place if you were differently constituted? What use (the question came) had she ever made of this supposedly valuable possession? What use did she ever intend to make of it? Oh, some. Some use, she promised. Because she could not die till that was done. And she sighed and frowned in abstraction, understanding what did not seem very understandable: that she was not yet good enough to die, could not afford it yet on any account.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Through a mixture of incredulity, sadness and amusement, she realised that he had mistaken her for a different person, a person helpful to people. And she felt flattered and yet untouched by this mistake which was so far-fetched, as if he had thought her someone of merit, impossibly famous.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“She had begun to suspect that affection, love, were things about which there was nothing to be done. People might love each other dearly, sleep together, live harmoniously or tempestuously together for years, but still, in a way, there was nothing to be done about it. She felt herself to have emerged at a point on the road she was in nature bound to have reached even at the end of decades of joyful living. It was a pity, perhaps, to have bypassed innocent happiness on the way...”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower