4 Quotes by Joan London

Sneakiness was a form of privacy and privacy here was the first loss.

He flicked through the yellowed rough-cut pages and breathed its musty smell. It filled him with a strange excitement, as if he'd caught a whiff of ancient, buried cities.

She limped, unaided around the house, like a bird with its wing broken. Tame, because it couldn’t fly away. All her time was taken up with managing herself, working out new ways to do things. Being a different person in the world.

Something had been taken away from him in the war, against his will, and he would never be the same. Years in labour camps, in mountains, in salt mines: only solitude was natural to him now. Some part of him was terminally tired. He was beyond intimacy. The pretence at normality, the weight of the past, the unreality of the days here had exhausted him.