Jo Sinclair Quotes

How fast the evening had passed, with its newnesses boxed one within the next like constantly opening flashes of excitement. (book 3 chapter 5)

Like touching an old scar, she felt again the crushing sense of responsibility, the sensation of being mysteriously punished... (book 3 chapter 6)

He began quietly to tell her the details of Kenny's letter, and as she listened she thought with a kind of tired and comfortable amusement that the ghosts were really catching up with her. Ralph, or her lie to herself, had kept them away for more than a year. But all ghosts had the right, sooner or later, to frighten the people they haunted. (book 5 chapter 2)

The walls of Saturday moved in on him with a combined pressure of fear and relief, the walls of a confessional. And yet these walls were different, too, pressing as they did ever closer toward him. (Chapter Six, p195)

[He] could not move for a while. When at last he went to put the last gate up over the door and to snap shut the locks, a confusion of walls and gates and locks swirled through his head. Don't make a wall in my head, he thought tremblingly. That's all I ask. Please! (chapter 6, p110)

It was night in her lovely Ballroom, where a dream was completely safe. (book 4 chapter 3)

"...Do you have anything definite on which to pin your dislike? Or is it a cloak for your dislike of someone else? Or perhaps yourself?" (Chapter Five, p159)

"Don't I have a right to live?" she said. "Can't a woman live even if she is a mother?" (book 5 chapter 5)

...How could anything as delicate as love turn into the harsh accusation of [his] eyes? (book 3 chapter 11)

It was Saturday again. Today he was eager to be here. Already he shared with the walls of this office the intimacy of secrets released, the wonderful freedom of shame and pain eased, even the inch of secret, the first few stumbling steps of ease. (Chapter Three, p77)

[He] suddenly leaned and pounded the coffee table. "Must the pattern be so set?" he demanded with bitterness. "A generation doesn't have to repeat itself...leave your poor twisted childhood. End it-don't trap another child in it"...when they had gone, her terrified recognition of what he had said was still there. The Ballroom was icy with the truth of every word. (book 5 chapter 5)

Liz picked a stifling evening in late summer to describe love. She yanked the word from a misty, delicately poised niche in Catherine's mind and flung it down newly expressed. The brutish meaning turned real as the smell and touch, the sounds, out of one of the childhood memories always hiding at the back of Catherine's mind. ( first lines)

She saw his dreamer eyes; the dream was love, togetherness, two people together.
She saw his whole dreamer self, and she called his name. (p297)

"Listen to her," [he] said. "A voice like iron. That one will never rent or sell to them. They are more her enemy than ours, even. Remember...even an Italian has his Hitler." (chapter 3, p43)

The word Depression faded from the American air, but in her it would never fade completely, she knew that. (chapter Five, p177)