Stephanie Bishop > Quotes

“He wonders what it would be like to belong somewhere and never doubt it.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“She knows now that leaving a place you love isn’t the worst thing; it is arriving in the second place and having to live as if the first place has disappeared. This is the tragedy – given enough time you come to doubt the place you knew before. That first life, once real, truly does disappear. Unspoken of, it becomes forgotten. And”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“At that age, at that time of my life, refusal involved a kind of strategising for which I lacked the language. I didn’t understand how to negotiate my own disavowal – of food choices at a restaurant, of which movie to see, of which route to take through the city, of anything to do with sex – because I didn’t know my own desire, I didn’t know the limits and contours of my own wants, or the boundaries of my own comfort. Or how much another might press these. Because in its best sense refusal is relative, always secondary, always an after-effect of desire or predilection, or just a logical response to the insistence on self-preservation, to life and its livingness. But at that time I had no internalised repertoire of the preferences against which I could measure and assess his requests. Or if I did, I hadn’t found a way of articulating them, of expressing them, of saying with my body or otherwise: This is how I feel. This is what I want. This is what I’m going to do.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Anniversary

“....he will always live in a place he is not from. For a long time he thought that habit would counter this fact and custom would disguise it. He thought, in the beginning, that such things would not matter in the long run. But they did, they do, they always will.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“Home is a secret world that closes its door in your absence and never lets you find it again.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“There is something impoverishing about this mutual mistrust, this mutual suspicion - something mean, and they do not know how to rise above it. Yet both are nostalgic for the same thing: the good life, or at least the fantasy of it.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“All truth cannot be captured in fiction, but I know I am more honest with myself when I am being fictional, rather than pretending to be real.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Anniversary

“There is something oddly seductive, he thinks, about the prospect of giving up.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“But how much ambition can a woman lay claim to before she is ruined by it? Unsexed, seen as living in error. Before it is challenged and held against her.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Anniversary

“It was like naming a baby: the title fitted for a while, then didn't, the creation outgrowing her meager definition.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“Australia is a land that offers a vision of the world as it was at creation, a country of new beginnings. It is where one comes when one needs to feel close to the original ferment of the earth. That is the story, is it not? Great men have become part of this place in one way or another and Henry has made it his business to know of these things... It is not a bad place. But it is not quite what Henry thought it would be. It is not the free place he was promised.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“There is a certain English dormouse, Charlotte remembers, which, upon ending its hibernation, comes out of its burrow and checks the air; if it deems the weather is not good enough, it retreats and sleeps for another year. How time passes differently for different creatures.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“What is the difference, she thinks, between a time and a place?”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“Patrick, telling me how much we had both sacrificed. It was a question of valour, of giving up differently; one form of renunciation being more acceptable than the other.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Anniversary

“He thinks often of the letter Charlotte left for him. "The story that starts a marriage," she wrote, "is very often the same story that ends it." Or rather, the seed of the end is planted in the beginning. It is the sadness of marriage that one can only learn where the end begins when it is too late; by then love is over and one is left bearing the various carapaces of wedlock - the little roof over our little house, the hate you wore on our honeymoon, the umbrellas we each carried of an English summer to keep us safe from unwanted rain. We err, she wrote, because we think happiness is a state in itself, when really it is only a symptom of love.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“There is always the fantasy of maternal love, but it does not accommodate a mother's fear of her children.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“For him, England has always been a land of fairy tales: a world of pictures, of black-and-white sketches depicting pale, chubby children eating currant buns. A land of fairies and witches, hedgerows and secret gardens, goblins and magical woods. When he arrived he was surprised to find it looked almost exactly as it did in the stories. The trees, the meadows, the little brick houses. He had not come to a real country, but a story come to life. Every day, then, he woke to a fantasy. And no matter how solid and cold and uncomfortable it was, he could never feel it was a country as such, could never quite believe that it had been formed from the same molten stuff that had made his birthplace. England was always secondary, always derivative, always an aftereffect of a story. Perhaps this is why, now, he can decide to leave it.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World

“Today he'll talk about Hardy's elegies. "But what are they about?", his students will ask. They want the love story. How he hates this question, understanding, now, in the shade of his office, that poetry is among the few things that can survive this question. If the poem is very good it is very hard to say what it is about. It is this and it is not that. It seems like one thing and then, after a while, not so much, one's understanding always shifting with the images and the sounds. He'll add something on Tennyson, perhaps, something on rhyme. Something about that very question, about poems being on of the few things that cannot be summarized or that can survive such an evil with something left over, something else. Something remaining. A trouble. A pleasure. A little extra.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World