18 Quotes by Jo Baker
- Author Jo Baker
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It was a thought, that. Not to attach yourself to a man, but to confront instead the open world, the wide fields of France and Spain, the ocean, anything. Not just to hitch a lift with the first fellow who looked as though he knew where he was going, but just to go.
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He stares now at the three words he has written.They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it; jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can't move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It's not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.
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- Author Jo Baker
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James had no intentions; he could not afford to have any; he could not afford to rope another person to his saddle. All he could do was keep his head down and get his work done.
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Sarah was soon lugging pasteboard boxes, paper packages and rolled samples of wallpaper. She had seen all of this before: she had daydreamed it. It was all very fine, but it was not as lovely as the daydream, and the packages slithered and slipped from her grip, and a box dug into her side, and how could it be that one printed paper was so vitally, importantly lovely and another was entirely dismissable, or that any or that any of it really mattered so very much, or indeed at all?
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- Author Jo Baker
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Work was not a cure; it never had been: it simply grew a skin on despair, and crusted over it.
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The room was dull now, and meaningless, with the young ladies gone from it. They were both lovely, almost luminous. And Sarah was, she knew, as she slipped along the servants’ corridor, and then up the stairs to the attic to hang her her new dress on the rail, just one of the many shadows that ebbed and tugged at the edges of the light.
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- Author Jo Baker
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Life was, Mrs. Hill had come to understand, a trial by endurance, which everybody, eventually, failed.
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So young Collins was there to select one of the girls, as you’d choose an apple from a costermonger’s stall. A brisk look over the piled-up stock: one of the bigger ones, the riper ones – that one will do. They were all the same, after all, weren’t they? The were of good stock. All the same variety, from the same tree. Why bother looking any further, or making any particular scrutiny of the individual fruits?
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- Author Jo Baker
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The ladies, who had condoled so thoroughly with her during her time of grief, found it rather more difficult to participate in her happiness, which takes a true and proper friend indeed.
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