Josephine Hart Quotes

Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.

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

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

Those who do not have imaginary conversations do not love.

We learn from tragedy. Slowly.

That is my story, simply told. Please do not ask again. I have told you in order to issue a warning. I have been damaged. Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.

They say that childhood forms us, that those early influences are the key to everything. Is the peace of the soul so easily won? Simply the inevitable result of a happy childhood. What makes childhood happy? Parental harmony? Good health? Security? Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life? Like leading a lamb to the slaughter.

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

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.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

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.

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

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.

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

When we mourn those who die young – those who have been robbed of time – we weep for lost joys. We weep for opportunities and pleasure we ourselves have never known. We feel sure that somehow that young body would have known the yearning delight for which we searched in vain all our lives. We believe that the untried soul, trapped in its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy that we still seek.

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.

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.

..I always recognize the foces that will shape my life. I let them do their work. Sometimes they tear through my life like a hurricane. Sometimes they simply shift the ground under me, so that I stand on different earth, and something or someone has been swallowed up. I steady myself, in the earthquate. I lie down, and let the hurricane pass over me. I never fight. Afterwards I look around me, and I say, 'Ah, so this at least is left for me. And that dear person has also survived.' I quietly inscribe on the stone tablet of my heart the name which has gone forever. Th inscription is a thing of agony. Then I start on my way again.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul: we search for its outlines all over our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in a place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. there are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved, or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock or recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

The majority do not desire the world—knowing on some primitive level that it disappoints. They are quite content to let the blind few pursue their path to wisdom. And to watch those trapped by genius forced to sacrifice themselves, and those trapped by talent to emulate them. Much better to be in the audience, watching the actors find the surprise ending.

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

I have been at the bedsides of the dying, who looked puzzled at their family’s grief as they left a world in which they had never felt at home.

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

When we mourn those who die young – those who have been robbed of time – we weep for lost joys. We weep for opportunities and pleasure we ourselves have never known. We feel sure that somehow that young body would have known the yearning delight for which we searched in vain all our lives. We believe that the untried soul, trapped in its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy that we still seek. We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep. All this we say, as we sleepwalk our time through years of days and nights. We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never-ending. Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday.

All damaged people are dangerous. Survival makes them so.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because they have no pity. They know that others can survive, as they did.

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

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

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

Life… has a way of testing the fault line

I have sometimes looked at old photographs of the smiling faces of victims, and searched them desperately for some sign that they knew. Surely they must have known that within hours or days their life was to end in that car crash, in that aeroplane disaster, or in domestic tragedy. But I can find no sign whatever. Nothing. They look out serenely, a terrible warning to us all. 'No I didn't know. Just like you ... there were no signs.' 'I who died at thirty... I too had planned my forties.' 'I who died at twenty had dreamed, as you do, of the roses round the cottage someday. It could happen to you. Why not? Why me? Why you? Why not?

Warriors, in the ancient world, put their souls away for safe keeping during times of danger. I'd put mine away and didn't want strangers to search for it. I might lose it. I'd watched those who'd thrown their souls in front of strangers and their bemusement when it was handed back to them, marked and scratched. Sometimes they didn't even get it back. Well, they'd been careless. Some of them wept, of course. But it was too late. It's murderously difficult to get your soul back, in any condition, once you've let it slip away from you. There's no search party willing to go out in all weathers to find your lost soul.

When boys called Bob and Bono would bring their own wild-rhythm celebration and the world would fall down in worshipful hallelujahs as it again acknowledged Ireland's capacity to create missionaries. So what if they were "the boys in the band"? They sang from a pulpit, an enormous pulpit looking down on a congregation that would knock your eyes out. A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that had produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we're teachers, missionaries.

To be in the game, but not playing with the intent to win, is to be the enemy.

And because birth is always violent, I never looked for, nor ever found, gentleness

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

A romantic refuses to see the changes in people he loves, or in cities which hold amorous memories for him.

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

I have sometimes looked at old photographs of the smiling faces of victims, and searched them desperately for some sign that they knew. Surely they must have known that within hours or days their life was to end in that car crash, in that aeroplane disaster, or in domestic tragedy. But I can find no sign whatever. Nothing. They look out serenely, a terrible warning to us all.

Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday.

It was the rare actor who brought authenticity to the screen; one exception was Tom Mix, a former ranch hand from Oklahoma. The “King of the Cowboys,” Mix made over 160 films and was a frequent visitor when Wyatt and Josephine were in Los Angeles, sometimes accompanying Wyatt to the racetrack. William S. Hart was another Earp acolyte. Where Tom Mix was a rough-and-ready showman, Hart was classically trained, as comfortable in a Shakespearean tragedy as he was in a Western.

I believe now that I was exposed too early to goodness and that I never recovered.

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.

ecco la mia storia in parole semplici, ho subito un danno: le persone danneggiate sono pericolose

C'è un paesaggio interiore, una geografia dell'anima;ne cerchiamo gli elementi per tutta la vita.

My mother used to tell me that a woman's beauty lied not in the size of her dowry, but in the modest depths of her maiden heart." ~ Josephine Hart (Angel of Darkness)

Alla fine tutto andò come va sempre. E, come succede sempre, col tempo la gente dimenticò, anche se dimenticare è un processo elettivo.

E soprattutto sapeva che per quanto ci si perda nel presente, per quanto si creda che il passato è stato cancellato, esso ritorna. Ritorna a giudicarti. E tu giudichi lui, il passato, nel paesaggio morale della memoria.

Dopo una tragedia, molti dei superstiti si sentono perduti.

Lei è irlandese, signor O'Hara. Dimenticare per lei non è possibile." "E lei è tedesco, signor Middlehoff. Per lei la memoria è sicuramente un peso.

Answer: The Franchise Affair, by Josephine Tey. “Book 7—A middle-aged spinster takes a house in the country for the summer, a man is shot to death in the clubroom, and her niece and nephew seem to know more than they admit. Answer: The Circular Staircase, by Mary Roberts Rinehart. “Book 8—Three children try to solve a neighborhood murder while their mystery writer mom races to meet a deadline. Answer: Home Sweet Homicide, by Craig Rice. “Book 9—Can the new mistress of Manderly ever escape the shadow of her husband’s first wife? Answer: Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier.” Max moved out from behind the coffee bar, reached up to grip Emma’s elbow.