Sight
Jessie Greengrass
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Growing up, I said, is a solitary process of disentanglement from those who made us and the reality of it cannot be avoided but only, perhaps, deferred”
“I wonder what it says about me that I seem to feel love only in absence -- that, present, I recognise only irritation, a list of inconveniences, the daily round of washing and child teas, the mundanity of looking after, and beyond this the recollection of what went before and how nice it was to be free; but I didn't recognise my freedom then -- or wasn't free, since freedom only functions as an opposite to constraint. There were other things, then; and how can I say, now, that a different choice would have left me more content, and that I would not have felt the loss of this life as now I feel the loss of that one--”
“I read not with any particular object in mind, nor really with the intention of retaining any information about the subjects that I chose, but rather because the act of reading was a habit, and because it was soothing and, perhaps, from a lifetime's inculcated faith in the explanatory power of books, the half-held belief that somewhere in those hectares upon hectares of printed pages I might find that fact which would make sense of my growing unhappiness, allowing me to peel back the obscurant layers of myself and lay bare at last the solid structure underneath.”
“without reflection, without the capacity to trace our lives backwards and pick the patterns out, we become liable to act as animals do, minus forethought and according to a set of governing laws which we have never taken the trouble to explore. Without reflection we do little more than drift upon the surface of things and self-determination is an illusion. We lay ourselves open to unbalance.”
“the convenient proximity to the city which we valued in principle but rarely took advantage of—could”
“and we stood together, waiting, for what was both our end and our beginning.”
“Once her thoughts broke like weather across her face, but that readable plasticity is gone and she is not so transparent: complexity has brought concealment.”
“Now there are nights when these positions return to me, when it is my own daughter who, climbing into bed at night for comfort, curls up beside me, and I feel my body curve into the shape my mother's did; or there are the nights of illness when I sponge my child's face, smoothing damp hair back from her forehead, and I see the outline of my mother's hands beneath the skin of mine...and I hear her voice in mine performing the liturgy of endearments, those sibilant invitations to returning sleep...and through these nights which ebb and flow like tides I feel memory as enactment and my mother, my grandmother, in my hands and in my arms, a half-presence, no longer quite lost.”
“Lying by Johannes in the darkness, envying him the unquestioned habit of sleep, the way he could remove himself, I wished that I might pause, take stock; that is a thought that comes back to me now: that I would like to pause pregnancy like a film, to walk away, do something else, returning later when I have had time to rest or think. I had always, before my pregnancy, regarded my body as a kind of tool, a necessary mechanism, largely self-sustaining, which, unless malfunctioning, did what I instructed of it, and so to have my agency so abruptly curtailed, revealed as little more than conceit, felt like betrayal. I no longer listened to my own command. Inside me, while I wished that I might be able to be elsewhere, that I might leave my body in the frowsty sheets and go downstairs to sit in the dark kitchen, unswollen and cool, cells split to cells, thoughtless and ascending, forming heart and lungs, eyes, ears- a hand grew nails- this child already going about its business, its still uncomprehending mind unreachable, apart.”
“Later, sat in rows on slat-backed chairs, they saw it: the flickering black-and-white image of Auguste holding his baby daughter up to a fishbowl, balancing the child on her feet so that she might look down at the water inside, the tumbling elision of the film's frames making manifest inside the winter darkness a months-old summer afternoon — and at the same time, 600 miles away in the Bavarian city of Wurzburg, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, chair of physics, ran through the streets to hand over a paper to the president of the university's Physical Medical Society, a first description of the X-ray.”
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Book Keywords:
books, female-body, pregnancy, reading, motherhood, parenting, happiness, learning
