Sinclair Ross > Quotes

“It’s an immense night out there, wheeling and windy. The lights on the street and in the houses against the black wetness, little unilluminating glints that might be painted on it. The town seems huddled together, cowering on a high tiny perch, afraid to move lest it topple into the wind.”
― Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House

“He never unbends to Paul completely anyway. I detect just the faintest air of condescension when they’re together, the natural conviction of superiority that it seems a man of six foot three can’t help feeling over a man just five foot seven and a half.”
― Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House

“Hypocrisy wears hard on a man who at heart isn’t that way.”
― Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House

“It's like being lost, and coming on an old wagon trail. You don't know where it leads, how long or why it's been abandoned, but at least it's a trail.”
― Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House

“What exactly she was thinking I never knew. Perhaps of the crop and the whole day’s stoking lost. Perhaps of the stranger who had come with his cornet for a day, and then as meaninglessly gone again. For she had been listening too, and she may have understood. A harvest, however lean, is certain every year; but a cornet at night is golden only once.
(Cornet at Night)”
― Sinclair Ross, The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories

“Ross’s style is always beautifully matched to his material – spare, lean, honest, no gimmicks, and yet in its very simplicity setting up continuing echoes of the mind. (Margaret Laurence's Afterword)”
― Sinclair Ross, The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories

“He had been bewildered by it once, her caring for a dull-witted fellow like him; then assured at last of her affection he had relaxed against it gratefully, unsuspecting it might ever be less constant than his own.”
― Sinclair Ross

“Religion and art [...] are almost the same thing anyway. Just different ways of taking a man out of himself, bringing him to the emotional pitch that we can ecstasy or rapture.”
― Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House

“Leaving a little puddle isn't what counts. It's making it in the big one.”
― Sinclair Ross, Whir of Gold

“You can have a slouch in your mind as well as you back.”
― Sinclair Ross, Whir of Gold

“For his presumption, his misunderstanding of what had been only a momentary weakness, instead of angering quickened her, roused from latency and long disuse all the instincts and resources of her femininity. She felt eager, challenged. Something was at hand that hitherto had always eluded her, even in the early days in John, something vital, beckoning, meaningful.”
― Sinclair Ross

“For in the country, farm or town, you always know. No one's just there. There's always a source, a why and wherefore.”
― Sinclair Ross, Whir of Gold

“His eyes were narrowed as he spoke, bitten a little with perplexity at the uselessness of being right against the world.”
― Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House

“It's all a hold up anyway-- money, body, brains. Do you think anybody's ever satisfied with what he's got a right to?”
― Sinclair Ross, Whir of Gold

“This horse is good for him. Good for his self-respect. You can’t ride a horse and feel altogether worthless, or be altogether convinced that society’s little world is the last world.”
― Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House

“As God as my judge, I don't know where I went wrong!”
― Sinclair Ross, Whir of Gold

“....she wondered whether they mightn’t better let the mortgage wait a little. Before they were worn out, before their best years were gone. It was something of life she wanted, not just a house and furniture; something of John, not pretty clothes when she would be too old to wear them. But John of course couldn’t understand. To him it seemed only right that she should have the pretty clothes—only right that he, fit for nothing else, should slave away fifteen hours a day to give them to her. There was in his devotion a baffling, insurmountable humility that made him feel the need of sacrifice. And when his muscles ached, when his feet dragged stolidly with weariness, then it seemed that in some measure at least he was making amends for his big hulking body and simple mind. (...) To him it was not what he actually accomplished by means of the sacrifice that mattered, but the sacrifice itself, the gesture - something done for her sake. And she, understanding, kept her silence.”
― Sinclair Ross, The Painted Door

“she too had faith in basic human goodness; still where her Sonny was concerned, there were certain types at which she thought it wise to draw the line.”
― Sinclair Ross, Whir of Gold

“Or perhaps, the thought seized her, perhaps instead of his smile it was she who had changed. She who, in the long, wind-creaked silence, had emerged from the increment of codes and loyalties to her real, unfettered self. She who now felt his air of appraisal as nothing more than an understanding of the unfulfilled woman that until this moment had lain within her brooding and unadmitted, reproved out of consciousness by the insistence of an outgrown, routine fidelity.”
― Sinclair Ross, The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories

“A man’s tragedy is himself, not the events that overtake him, and the same Main Street slight and condescension that put cloud over Philip for life, Steve is emerging from already and shaking off.”
― Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House

“Her hair was done, her lips touched up. A look of competence, decision.”
― Sinclair Ross, Whir of Gold

“I don’t know what the solution is. Surely there’s more than one way for a man like Philip to earn his living. Surely something can be done to make him realize it. Because you’re a hypocrite you lose self-respect, because you lose your self-respect you lose your initiative and self-belief – it’s the same vicious circle, every year closing in a little tighter. Already it’s making him morose and cynical – smaller than he ought to be. I can’t help wondering what he’ll be like ten years from now.”
― Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House

“It’s only since we’ve had Steve with us that I’ve realized how much of himself a man has to give before he’s really possessed. I used to think it was possession because we lived together as man and wife. I didn’t know how little it can amount to wanting a woman at night, putting up with her in the daytime.”
― Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House

“There must have been a moment when the key clicked and turned-- a moment of decision, involving me-- but when I go back I find only the door, fist closed, then open, never the act of opening it.”
― Sinclair Ross, Whir of Gold

“Sorry I didn’t do better,” he said. “I’ll have to come back another year and have another lesson.”
I clenched my hands and clung hard to this promise that I knew he couldn’t keep. I wanted to rebel against what was happening, against the clumsiness and crudity of life, but instead I stood quiet a moment, almost passive, then wheeled away and carried his cornet to the buggy.
(Cornet at Night)”
― Sinclair Ross, The Lamp at Noon

“Life has proved bitter and deceptive to Philip because of the artist in him, because he has kept seeking a beauty and significance that isn’t life’s to give; but Steve is a shrewd little realist, who, given opportunity to meet life on its own terms, ought to make a fair success of it.”
― Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House