Home > Author > Josephine Winslow Johnson
1 " Most people have the blindness of new-born things - a not-incurable blindness, the sight being there but its use not known. "
― Josephine Winslow Johnson , Now in November
2 " ...the presence of each other and a lusty love of being, of living and knowing there was tomorrow and God knows how many more tomorrows and each a life and sufficient in itself... "
3 " She knew that nothing was ever as overwhelming or final as he seemed to think - that if he would wait, instead of shouting, there'd be less to shout over in the end. "
4 " But only in mad people fear goes on constant night and day, wearing one ditch in the mind that all thoughts must travel in. "
5 " And there was the inner walking on the edge of darkness, the peering into black doorways...the unrevealed answer which must be somewhere, and yet might not be even present or hidden in that darkness..this under-life which when traced or held to was not there, and yet kept coming back and thrust up like an iron dike through the solid layers of the sane and understood. The moment of self-searching, of standing under the oaks at night and asking-What?Who? What am I?...and the moment of feeling the self gone, lost or never existent. "
6 " The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness. "
7 " What is sanity, after all, except the control of madness? "
8 " 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? "
9 " Lord make me satisfied with small things. Make me content to live on the outside of life. God make me love the rind! "
10 " ... love and fear increase together with a precision almost mathematical: the greater the love is then the greater the fear is. "
11 " I like to pretend that the years alter and revalue, but begin to see that time does nothing but enlarge without mutation. You have a chance here--more than a chance, it is thrust upon you--to be alone and still. To look backward and forward and see with clarity. To see the years behind, the essential loneliness, and the likeness of one year to the next. The awful order of cause and effect. Root leading to stem and inevitable growth, and the same sap moving through tissue of different years, marked like the branches with inescapable scars of growth. "
12 " I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter, since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times. "
13 " There must be some reason, I thought, why we should go on year after year, with this lump of debt, scrailing earth down to stone, giving so much and with no return. There must be some reason why I was made quiet and homely and slow, and then given this stone of love to mumble. "
14 " ...she had a faith that was almost religious in believing a thing must be so if a man would bother to write it out seriously and bind it in a book. "
15 " It’s a lie that the body is a prison! It’s the mind, I tell you!—always the cold, strong mind that’s jailer. "
16 " wildly, or not at all, and ate sometimes like a dog starved out and savage, chewing and mumbling, and at other times would only pick at her food and stare out the window while Merle and I ate patiently all that was put in front of us. She’d sleep at odd times and hours, stretched out like a lynx in sun, and creep out of the house at night to wander around in the marshes. "
17 " That you, Marget?" he asked. "You'd better come up to bed soon." He went upstairs then and left us standing together in the dark. It was I and not Kerrin, and so there was nothing to fear or shout over.I saw quite plainly what he had meant; nor did it hurt less to know that this was true. "
18 " They would have been kind, I know, but kindness is sour comfort. "
