Elizabeth Harrower QUOTES

1 " So they had all had more troubles than she. Did that really make them superior? If two men were walking along the street and a brick fell on one, missing the other, did that make the injured one a better person? "

― Elizabeth Harrower

2 " You can admire the way someone meets hard circumstances, but you can't admire him because of them. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , In Certain Circles

3 " Perhaps this was part of growing older, to undergo hideous alterations in the deepest certainties, in love, in lovers, finally in one's self. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , In Certain Circles

4 " What I do understand is that at any point in a woman’s life she may come across something like a cement pyramid in the middle of the road. Another person. People. She’s capable of sitting there, convinced that it would be impossible to forsake her position, till it becomes a private Thermopylae. This sort of block was probably designed for the survival of our species, but the cost’s high. What makes men superior is that they don’t – on the whole – stop functioning forever because of another person . . . . "

― Elizabeth Harrower , In Certain Circles

5 " Well, you know what men are. Anything new gets them in. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , The Watch Tower

6 " For five days the city had wilted under a hard sky, sweltering in a temperature that stayed fixed in the middle nineties. Even at night there was no relief from the heat. Pyjamas and nighties stuck clammily to damp skin. Half-clad, self-pitying figures rose, exasperated by insomnia, to stumble through darkened rooms in search of a cooler plot than their bed, hoping that, all accidentally, they might waken any gross sleeper the house contained. Cold water ran hot from the taps, and the roads turned to tar. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , Down in the City

7 " The city, to her, meant a few particular blocks - the best blocks - lying together in a neat rectangle, linked by arcades and department stores; three streets one way, cut by four at right angles, bound at the top by gardens, self-enclosed at the bottom and either end. Three or four times a week she walked the streets of these blocks, smelt the coffee, the flowers, the rich expensive leather, the cosmetics. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , Down in the City

8 " Oh. Yes. He's very bright. But the world, poor world, was as over-burdened with cleverness as with stupidity, and in a sense (lacking this), did they not amount to the very same thing? Oh, he's clever, Clare thought, but who's good? Who's good? Who is good? "

― Elizabeth Harrower , The Watch Tower

9 " He thinks as long as he can get up and go to work, no one should complain. He doesn't realise what he's like. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , The Watch Tower

10 " You wonder why he cleared out tonight, do you? Do you? I'll tell you why. I can tell you. You don't know, do you? You don't know - do you? No, that's right. But Mr. Shaw does. Mr. Shaw knows. He's out tonight so he can be amongst men. Men. That's why. Yes. That's why. You didn't know that, did you? You're too stupid, to know he's sick in his guts of being in a house full of women. Christ! They're not fit - they're not fit for me to vomit on. That's why. You're just - things. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , The Watch Tower

11 " I was attracted to the strangeness of his mind as a psychiatrist might have been drawn to an interesting case. he wanted a resident analyst. Neither of us understood. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , In Certain Circles

12 " He loved to be so concentrated on. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , The Watch Tower

13 " What is it about someone genuine that makes other people want to crucify him in some tiny-seeming way? Someone has probably written the reason down in a book. But no one takes any notice, if we do know. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , In Certain Circles

14 " How unfair to everyone that the knowing of one person, the separation, should so poison and diminish every other association. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , In Certain Circles

15 " What makes men superior is that they don’t—on the whole—stop functioning forever because of another person. They lack this built-in handicap, and are they lucky! "

― Elizabeth Harrower , In Certain Circles

16 " If we lived forever, there would be time to recover from mistakes of twenty years duration. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , In Certain Circles

17 " But sooner or later people have to take up their own lives, not disperse them out as though they were knitting wool that a clever knitter might handle better. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , In Certain Circles

18 " I can't see the world as a great hospital with us all nursing and pitying each other. "

― Elizabeth Harrower , In Certain Circles