Five Bells Quotes

“How many scenes of blasted terrain, or medics rushing headlong with a stretcher on which lay a figure beneath a sheet, too small, too anonymous, and too deathly still? How long would they mean? Ellie thought of the Japanese photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, who photographed movies inside the cinema. He left the shutter of the camera open in the dark auditorium and the film exposed for the entire length of the screening. The result was not a wildly complicated superimposition of images, but simple white-out, pure light, a flare of nothing. Too many images, layered together, left only a blank.”
― Gail Jones, Five Bells

“With a trampoline heart she saw the Bridge to her left: its modern shape, its optimistic uparching. Familiar from postcards and television commercials, here now, here-now, was the very thing itself, neat and enthralling. There were tiny flags on top and the silhouetted ant forms of people arduously climbing the steep bow. It looked stamped against the sky, as if nothing could remove it. It looked indelible. A coathanger, guidebooks said, but it was so much grander than this implied.”
― Gail Jones, Five Bells

“He could smell the lavender scent of the powder she dabbed under her arms, and his own fluids, and hers pungently intermingling.”
― Gail Jones, Five Bells

“They had been mistaken, it seemed, in seeking other tongues. Languages were not a special capacity, as she had once imagined, but incautious assent to the wrong kinds of meanings.   A”
― Gail Jones, Five Bells

“She imagined the trade in meanings as a kind of game, in which tokens shaped like mahjong tiles were exchanged and switched. Signs moved from one world to another, clacked together, made new sequences. A man in Bolshevik Russia became virtually Chinese; a world unfolded from a paper envelope. This game existed in the borderless continent of her father’s head. She could see how he concentrated: ‘cher’ in Russian, ‘neve’ in Italian, ‘snow’ in English, until he arrived at the sound ‘xue’, and then the character: the radical symbol for rain, the strokes for frozen, the little block of marks that revealed the transition from alphabets to ideograms.”
― Gail Jones, Five Bells