Jo Baker Quotes

#1. Life was, Mrs. Hill had come to understand, a trial by endurance, which everybody, eventually, failed.

Jo Baker

#2. The intimacy of her name on his lips: the years fled like starlings.

Jo Baker

#3. Too much time spent with books had not fitted her to be easy with herself, and other people.

Jo Baker

#4. 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.

Jo Baker

#5. I would ask if you miss me like I miss you, so that there is not another spot in all the world that seems to mean anything at all, but where you are.

Jo Baker

#6. 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.

Jo Baker

#7. Things could change so entirely, in a heartbeat; the world could be made entirely anew, because someone was kind.

Jo Baker

#8. Words had become overnight just little coins, insignificant and unfreighted, to be exchanged for ribbons, buttons, for an apple or an egg.

Jo Baker

#9. It didn't do to get dependent. It didn't do to get attached.

Jo Baker

#10. You have no idea at all yet what you can bear!

Jo Baker

#11. Wherever you are in this world, the sky is still above you. Wherever you are, God still watches over you; He sees into your heart.

Jo Baker

#12. Jane Austen's work was my first experience of grown-up literature, and has supplied a lifetime of pleasure: it's the only book that, as an adult, I re-read.

Jo Baker

#13. Sarah, in the crush, was able to study Miss Lucas's face discreetly, she wondered what it was like to know that you were to be married, that you would have a home, an income, that you were set up for life. To have achieved all this simply by agreeing to put up with one particular man until he died.

Jo Baker

#14. 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.

Jo Baker

#15. He nodded them a good evening, but instead unhitched the horses and brought them back to a trough in the Market Square. When they had drunk, breaking the moon into shards and ripples, he led them back to the coach, to wait. There

Jo Baker

#16. You can't be permanently hysterical, so you might as well not bother getting started.

Jo Baker

#17. She wished the journey was over, but she did not want to arrive.

Jo Baker

#18. Like a pebble dropped into a stream, his arrival had made a ripple in the surface of things. He'd felt that; he'd seen it in the way they looked at him, Sarah and Mrs. Hill and the little girl. But the ripples were getting fainter as they spread,

Jo Baker

#19. Work was not a cure; it never had been: it simply grew a skin on despair, and crusted over it.

Jo Baker

#20. Perhaps it was not an easy thing, to be so entirely happy. Perhaps it was actually quite a fearful state to live in
the knowledge that one had achieved a complete success.

Jo Baker

#21. Because he wanted nothing from her; this was a generous, expansive feeling, unattached to the possibility of gratification; it was the simple happiness that came from knowing that one particular person was alive in the world

Jo Baker

#22. It had been a dreadful miscalculation, she saw that now: that all of them should be unhappy, so that he should not be disgraced.

Jo Baker

#23. Work, Mrs. Hill knew, might not be a cure for all ailments, but it was a sovereign remedy against the more brooding kinds.

Jo Baker

#24. The fields studded with sheep.

Jo Baker