Harvest Quotes

“There's solace in the thought that I will never finish missing her.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“Secrets are like pregnancies hereabouts. You can hide them for a while but then they will start screaming.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“The mood has changed. It's heavier. We were liquid; now we're stones.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“The dead leaves fly. They're cropped and gathered to the rich barn of the earth.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“Any hawk looking down on the orchard's cloistered square, hoping for the titbit of a beetle or a mouse, would see a patterned canopy of trees, line on line, the orchard's melancholy solitude, the jewellery of leaves. It would see the backs of horses, the russet, apple-dotted grass, the saltire of two crossing paths worn smooth by centuries of feet, and two grey heads, swirling in a lover's dance, like blown seed husks caught up in an impish and exacting wind and with no telling when or where they'll come to ground again.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“And it seems I ought to scatter too. Perhaps at once. It's always better to turn your back on the gale than press your face against it.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“I am excused, I think, for wondering if I am the only one alive this afternoon with no other living soul who wants to cling to me, no other soul who'll let me dampen her. The day has ended and the light has snuffed. I'm left to trudge into the final evening with nobody to loop their soaking hands through mine.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“I think I'd like her to turn round. I want to see her face a second time. That first time she was hardly visible. She was little more than dark on dark, a body shape, as I remember it. If only she would spin round on her heels and the moonlight would oblige, I could persuade myself she's real and not a spectre summoned up by loneliness.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“On nights like this, when there is anxiety about, there is a glut of lovemaking. Then the moon is our dance master. He has us move in unison. He has us trill and carol in each other's ears until the stars themselves have swollen and ripened to our cries. As ever here, we find our consolations sowing seed.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“There's not a season set aside for pondering and reveries. It will not les us hesitate or rest; it does not wish us to stand back and comment on its comeliness or devise a song for it. It has no time to listen to our song. It only asks us not to tire in our hard work. It wants to see us leathery, our necks and fore-arms burnt as black as chimney oak; it wants to leave us thinned and sinewy from work. It taxes us from dawn to dusk, and torments us at night; that is the taxing that the thrush complains about. Our great task each and every year is to defend ourselves against hunger and defeat with implements and tools.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“It's certain that you cannot tell from how a person works or how a person strolls behind her hens what kind of life they live in secrecy.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“Wheat—like men and women—benefits from being crushed. Crushing makes it fit to stand up all the better.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“Dissent is never counted; it is weighed. The master always weighs the most.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest

“We are a heathen company, more devoted to the customs and the Holy days than to the Holiness itself. We find more pleasure in the song and dance of God than in the piety.”
― Jim Crace, Harvest