24 Quotes by Josephine Winslow Johnson

You can’t be a little bit saintly any more than you can be a little bit pregnant.

New gods arise when they are needed.

Old people who live too long come to resemble turtles. As though time turned in a curve, and down they go to the reptiles again. Not the little wet naked frog they were born. But the tortoise. Cold eyes, sagging circles of skin, the nose becomes beak. The shell of sleep.

I am sick of war. Every woman of my generation is sick of war. Fifty years of war. Wars rumored, wars beginning, wars fought, wars ending, wars paid for, wars endured.

Freedom is no guarantee of anything. It is only defined today by what it is not. What it is takes forms strange and of infinite variety – bizarre as in a masquerade.

The things we felt most are hardest to put into words. Hate is always easier to speak of than love. How shall I make love go through the sieve of words and come out something besides a pulp?

There is ‘a time to be born’ – and born again, free of accumulated, encrusted sores of fears and prejudices, old hates, of cancerous wounds, old prides. And there is a time to die – a time for the blue, unburied child of our young years to be decently interred – and to get on with the living.

The dead elm leaves hung like folded bats.

And blessed are they who have learned the rhythms of the invisible clock whose hours and minutes are immense and soundless. The great clock of the seasons and the years, and the small clock of the intuition, whose timing is guided by the heart.