16 Quotes by Jane Urquhart

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

I had come to the very edge of a moment, the moment when it might have been possible to remove the cloak of fear that had protected me all those years. But after all was said and done, the flesh beneath was too white and weak to be exposed. Is there really any one among you who in the face of such grief would not panic at the approach of happiness?

Someday," Joseph said to his granddaughter, "someday something will happen and you will want to go back to the carving. You won't be able to prevent yourself; that's just the way it is. The world always somehow takes us back to the chisel. Something happens and we have to respond.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The women of this family leaned towards extremes.