Longbourn Quotes

“Things could change so entirely, in a heartbeat; the world could be made entirely anew, because someone was kind.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“Life was, Mrs. Hill had come to understand, a trial by endurance, which everybody, eventually, failed.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“...too much time spent with books had not fitted her to be easy with herself, and other people.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“Because he wanted nothing from her; this was a generous, expansive feeling, unattached to the possibility of gratification; it was the simple happiness that came from knowing that one particular person was alive in the world”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“I would ask if you miss me like I miss you, so that there is not another spot in all the world that seems to mean anything at all, but where you are.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“Sarah, in the crush, was able to study Miss Lucas's face discreetly, she wondered what it was like to know that you were to be married, that you would have a home, an income, that you were set up for life. To have achieved all this simply by agreeing to put up with one particular man until he died.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“It was a thought, that. Not to attach yourself to a man, but to confront instead the open world, the wide fields of France and Spain, the ocean, anything. Not just to hitch a lift with the first fellow who looked as though he knew where he was going, but just to go.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“Wherever you are in this world, the sky is still above you. Wherever you are, God still watches over you; He sees into your heart.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“Perhaps it was not an easy thing, to be so entirely happy. Perhaps it was actually quite a fearful state to live in--the knowledge that one had achieved a complete success.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“The ladies, who had condoled so thoroughly with her during her time of grief, found it rather more difficult to participate in her happiness, which takes a true and proper friend indeed.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“The room was dull now, and meaningless, with the young ladies gone from it. They were both lovely, almost luminous. And Sarah was, she knew, as she slipped along the servants' corridor, and then up the stairs to the attic to hang her her new dress on the rail, just one of the many shadows that ebbed and tugged at the edges of the light.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“You have no idea at all yet what you can bear!”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“Threads that drift alone will sometimes simply twine themselves together, without need for spindle or distaff: brought into each other’s ambit, they bind themselves tight with the force of their own torsion. And this same torsion can, in the course of things, bundle the resulting cord back upon itself, ravelling it up into a skein, returning to the point of its beginning.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“When she was a girl, and still growing, ravenous, whenever there had been a cake - a sponge cake, dusted with sugar, which Mrs. Hill had conjured up out of eggs and flour and creamy butter - Sarah would never even let herself look at it, because she knew that it was not for her. Instead, she would carry it upstairs to be rendered into crumbs, and the crumbs lifted from the plate by a moistened Bennet finger, and the empty smeared plate carried back again. So Sarah would stare instead at the carpet underneath her feet, or at the painting of a horse with a strangely small head that hung at the end of the hall, or the rippled yellow curtains in the parlour, and would do her best not to breathe, not to inhale the scent of vanilla or lemon or almonds; event to glance at the cake was an impossible agony. And for months, she realized, James had hardly looked at her at all.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“James had no intentions; he could not afford to have any; he could not afford to rope another person to his saddle. All he could do was keep his head down and get his work done.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“Sarah wondered what it could be like, to live like this - life as a country dance, where everything is lovely, and graceful, and ordered, and every single turn is preordained, and not a foot may be set outside the measure. Not like Sarah's own out-in-all-weathers haul and trudge, the wind howling and blustery, the creeping flowers in the hedgerows, the sudden sunshine.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“she wondered what it was like to know that you were to be married, that you would have a home, an income, that you were set up for life. To have achieved all this simply by agreeing to put up with one particular man until he died.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“Other, dryer customers came and went, having just stepped out of their conveyances or popped down the street from their houses in the town. They left their umbrellas dripping at the door, and looked at her with that particular combination of sympathy and amusement that the soaked seem always to elicit in the dry.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“So young Collins was there to select one of the girls, as you'd choose an apple from a costermonger's stall. A brisk look over the piled-up stock: one of the bigger ones, the riper ones --that one will do. They were all the same, after all, weren't they? The were of good stock. All the same variety , from the same tree. Why bother looking any further, or making any particular scrutiny of the individual fruits?”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“Words had become overnight just little coins, insignificant and unfreighted, to be exchanged for ribbons, buttons, for an apple or an egg.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“everyone would just keep on keeping on, pretending that nothing much had happened, and the pretense would become habitual, until, eventually, the lie would seem more real than the truth.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“It is not, perhaps, an entirely happy situation after all, to gain something that has been wanted for long years. The object itself, once achieved, is often found not to be exactly as anticipated. It has perhaps become tired and worn over time; flaws that had been overlooked for years are now all too apparent. One finds one does not know what to do with it at all.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“Work was not a cure; it never had been: it simply grew a skin on despair, and crusted over it.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“Like a pebble dropped into a stream, his arrival had made a ripple in the surface of things. He’d felt that; he’d seen it in the way they looked at him, Sarah and Mrs. Hill and the little girl. But the ripples were getting fainter as they spread,”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“It was not that long ago that dinner had meant swallowing down whatever you could get your filthy hands on. . . Dinner meant something different here. It meant half a day's work for two women. It mean polished crystal and silver, it meant a change of dress for the diners and a special suit of clothes for the servants to serve it up in. Here, dinner meant delay; it meant extending, with all the complexities of preparation and all those rituals of civility, the gap between hunger and its satisfaction. Here, now, it seemed that hunger itself might be relished, because its cessation was guaranteed; there always was - there always would be - meat and vegetables and dumplings and cakes and pies and plates and forks and pleases and thank yous, and endless plates of bread and butter.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“He knew it would not kill him to see her happy with someone else; these things were not fatal, no matter what poets and novelists liked to pretend.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“It was a sheet of pale brilliance that peeled swiftly away, sucked out of sight by some irresistible persuasion, leaving behind an expanse of silvery mud, miles and miles of it, trenched with glittering rills and scattered with dipping, wheeling, crying birds. Beyond the bay, the lake-country hills stood stark against the sky. They were deep blue, and still creased here and there with snow.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“If Elizabeth had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she'd most likely be a sight more careful with them.”
― jo baker, Longbourn

“The young ladies might behave like they were smooth and sealed as alabaster statues underneath their clothes, but then they would drop their soiled shifts on the bedchamber floor, to be whisked away and cleansed, and would thus reveal themselves to be the frail, leaking, forked bodily creatures that they really were. Perhaps that was why they spoke instructions at her from behind an embroidery hoop or over the top of a book: she had scrubbed away their sweat, their stains, their monthly blood; she knew they weren’t as rarefied as angels, and so they just couldn’t look her in the eye.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“Mrs. Bennet was not one to tiptoe around the edges of disaster, with one eye to the abyss and another to her own comportment: she plunged headlong in, and as she fell, took pains to enumerate the discomforts and inconveniences of the fall.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn