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Longbourn QUOTES

Longbourn QUOTES

1 " 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 , Longbourn

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

― Jo Baker , Longbourn

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

― Jo Baker , Longbourn

4 " 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 , Longbourn

5 " Other, dryer customers came and went, having just stepped out of their conveyances or popped down the street from their houses in the town. They left their umbrellas dripping at the door, and looked at her with that particular combination of sympathy and amusement that the soaked seem always to elicit in the dry. "

― Jo Baker , Longbourn

6 " everyone would just keep on keeping on, pretending that nothing much had happened, and the pretense would become habitual, until, eventually, the lie would seem more real than the truth. "

― Jo Baker , Longbourn

7 " The young ladies might behave like they were smooth and sealed as alabaster statues underneath their clothes, but then they would drop their soiled shifts on the bedchamber floor, to be whisked away and cleansed, and would thus reveal themselves to be the frail, leaking, forked bodily creatures that they really were. Perhaps that was why they spoke instructions at her from behind an embroidery hoop or over the top of a book: she had scrubbed away their sweat, their stains, their monthly blood; she knew they weren’t as rarefied as angels, and so they just couldn’t look her in the eye. "

― Jo Baker , Longbourn

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

― Jo Baker , Longbourn

9 " ...too much time spent with books had not fitted her to be easy with herself, and other people. "

― Jo Baker , Longbourn

10 " 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 , Longbourn

11 " 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 , Longbourn

12 " 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 , Longbourn

13 " 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 , Longbourn

14 " 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 , Longbourn

15 " The room was dull now, and meaningless, with the young ladies gone from it. They were both lovely, almost luminous. And Sarah was, she knew, as she slipped along the servants' corridor, and then up the stairs to the attic to hang her her new dress on the rail, just one of the many shadows that ebbed and tugged at the edges of the light. "

― Jo Baker , Longbourn

16 " You have no idea at all yet what you can bear! "

― Jo Baker , Longbourn

17 " Threads that drift alone will sometimes simply twine themselves together, without need for spindle or distaff: brought into each other’s ambit, they bind themselves tight with the force of their own torsion. And this same torsion can, in the course of things, bundle the resulting cord back upon itself, ravelling it up into a skein, returning to the point of its beginning. "

― Jo Baker , Longbourn

18 " 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 , Longbourn

19 " Sarah wondered what it could be like, to live like this - life as a country dance, where everything is lovely, and graceful, and ordered, and every single turn is preordained, and not a foot may be set outside the measure. Not like Sarah's own out-in-all-weathers haul and trudge, the wind howling and blustery, the creeping flowers in the hedgerows, the sudden sunshine. "

― Jo Baker , Longbourn

20 " 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 , Longbourn