Josephine Hart Quotes

#1. The weapon of memory, turned on the self, is an apocalyptic sword.

Josephine Hart

#2. Those who do not have imaginary conversations do not love.

Josephine Hart

#3. For why trap what is already trapped? It is only in flight that we know the freedom of the bird

Josephine Hart

#4. Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable.

Josephine Hart

#5. We are here to add to the sum of human goodness. To prove the thing exists.

Josephine Hart

#6. All damaged people are dangerous. Survival makes them so.' 'Why?' 'Because they have no pity. They know what others can survive, as they did.

Josephine Hart

#7. The passion that transforms life, and art, did not seem to be mine. But in all essentials, my life was a good performance.

Josephine Hart

#8. Sissy,travelling down the road with you was all I have ever wanted in life.
The beauty of it! No matter how long this takes, I'll wait.

Josephine Hart

#9. We learn from tragedy. Slowly.

Josephine Hart

#10. Memory is never pure. And recollection is always coloured by the life lived since

Josephine Hart

#11. She was the split-second experience that changes everything.; the car smash; the letter we shouldn't have opened; the lump in the breast or groin; the blinding flash. On my well-ordered stage-set the lights were up, and maybe at last I was waiting in the wings.

Josephine Hart

#12. The miraculous intimacy we shared did not have the time to generate into resentful emotional bondage

Josephine Hart

#13. We do have choice, but not without some agony.

Josephine Hart

#14. Men and women find all sorts of ways to be together, all sorts of ways. Yours was high and dangerous. Most of us stay on the lower paths.

Josephine Hart

#15. Where would we be without it, memory? Well, it'll never die here. Never in this country. We feed it too well.

Josephine Hart

#16. Life is usually loved more than our most sacred love. In that knowledge lies the beginning of our cruelty and of our survival.

Josephine Hart

#17. Time, for a man who has never truly felt a second of it, it not a great sacrifice

Josephine Hart

#18. She's always loved writers, even more than the books I think. They're like personal friends to her.

Josephine Hart

#19. Poetry contains almost all you need to know about life.

Josephine Hart

#20. I want to know what's wrong with loving someone for life? Even when they're dead? What exactly is wrong with that? Why should I put him away, out of my mind? Like he's out of fashion. Does no one love for ever any more? Is no one built for the long road?

Josephine Hart

#21. Was my sin basically one of untruthfulness? Or, more likely, one of cowardice? But the liar knows the truth. The coward knows his fear and runs away.

Josephine Hart

#22. And if I was bewildered through those decades, totally bewildered, so was the country I came from. The majority, what was the phrase? 'Condemn utterly what is happening, this barbarity.' But that's all we did. Condemn. And march. But not often enough.

Josephine Hart

#23. There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.

Josephine Hart

#24. Television ... the new gladiatorial arena.

Josephine Hart

#25. Lucky people should hide. Pray the days of wrath do not visit their home.

Josephine Hart

#26. Very odd, old age. Always knew it would happen, if I was lucky. I just didn't expect it so soon.

Josephine Hart

#27. The day then trapped me in its iron bars of phone calls and meetings, letters to read, letters to write, decisions to make, promises to break.

Josephine Hart

#28. I am prepared to accept from others their own version of reality. I think it is a basic freedom really, to create one's own reality from whatever truths are available.

Josephine Hart

#29. Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.

Josephine Hart

#30. Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision
the ability to select the elements vital to survival, while ignoring the great truths.

Josephine Hart

#31. Children are the great gamble. From the moment they are born, our helplessness increases. Instead of being ours to mould and shape after our best knowledge and endeavour, they are themselves. From their birth they are the centre of our lives, and the dangerous edge of existence.

Josephine Hart

#32. A concealed truth, that's all a lie is. Either by omission or commission we never do more than obscure. The truth stays in the undergrowth, waiting to be discovered.

Josephine Hart

#33. There was a full moon in the starless sky. I thought how rarely I had noticed such things. Some deep failure of the soul perhaps. An inherited emptiness. A nothingness passed from generation to generation. A flaw in the psyche, discovered only by those who suffer by it.

Josephine Hart

#34. To appear unambitious amongst the ambitious is to invite loathing or fear. To be in the game, but not playing with intent to win, is to be the enemy.

Josephine Hart

#35. My mother insured that a life of petty facts and dutiful farming was kept at bay by her passionate intensity, which nurtured the essential dreaminess of his nature

Josephine Hart

#36. What really makes us is beyond grasping. It's way beyond knowing. We give in to love ... because it gives us some sense of what is unknowable. Nothing else matters, not at the end.

Josephine Hart