The Watch Tower Quotes

“She thinks he represents security. She thinks he might change and be kind to her. She pities him; that enslaves her.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Oh. Yes. He's very bright. But the world, poor world, was as over-burdened with cleverness as with stupidity, and in a sense (lacking this), did they not amount to the very same thing? Oh, he's clever, Clare thought, but who's good? Who's good? Who is good?”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Well, you know what men are. Anything new gets them in.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“There was the external world—office, friends, amusements—And then there was home—so real it seemed to have six dimensions, fundamental as the floor of the world. Nothing at all from the outside could penetrate. The outside was a place of coloured tissue paper where people went about not knowing about reality.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“She had begun to suspect that affection, love, were things about which there was nothing to be done. People might love each other dearly, sleep together, live harmoniously or tempestuously together for years, but still, in a way, there was nothing to be done about it. She felt herself to have emerged at a point on the road she was in nature bound to have reached even at the end of decades of joyful living. It was a pity, perhaps, to have bypassed innocent happiness on the way...”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Life had agreed to find her useful. It knew, something knew, at last, that she was here. Anything was possible. Everything was true. People could indeed change out of recognition, permanently, between two breaths.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“But if none of her hopes came to pass, it would be bearable. She knew from experience that everything was bearable because it had to be. All that happened was that people changed, and that was sometimes sad.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Watching him steadily, Laura had a wordless perception that in human affairs in an absolute sense there can never be any victors, there is no such thing as self-interest, and no way of being right.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“She was unapproachable as the condemned are unapproachable and he was responsible as the free always are.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Standing with bare feet and rumpled hair, they searched each other’s eyes with no difficulty for the first time for years, hardly noticing the boundary they had crossed in doing so, the minor miracle that allowed them to talk spontaneously without thought of profit or loss or hidden meaning. For out there in the grey of water, sky and land, there were dreadful clouds, a mad wind and hideous noises.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“in old times, whole communities used the method of passive resistance to redress a grievance. The technique was to sit motionless in a public place, without food and exposed to the weather, until the ruler agreed to the people’s demands. Sometimes, when he was particularly tyrannical, his subjects would desert the land, leaving the ruler to live in loneliness and mend his ways. In ancient India it was considered the duty of a wise man to abandon the kingdom when all methods of weaning a king from bad ways had failed.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“She did apprehend other people and feel them with clarity and depth, receiving information about them involuntarily from her intuition. She had never known what this gratuitous news was for. She wished her fellows well, but it had never entered her head that she—pusillanimous, vicious, sustained only by a peculiar sort of pride and insurmountable determination—could be useful to anyone. If it had been suggested, it would have seemed the cruellest joke. Interest and sympathy she had given easily, but acts had always, obviously, been impossible. She had no authority.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“She and Bernard had traversed the same extreme country. Because the details of his life were so removed from hers she had judged him with airy contempt as excessive, bogus, as if he had invented a life spiked with tortuous incidents to win favours and interest and pity, when all the time—The complacency with which she had been able to accept his hard situation as his ‘destiny’ smote her. This was how she and Laura had been judged by Blanche Parkes and her kind: Well, well, poor things. It’s their own fault, of course. Nothing like that ever happens to me.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“She was twenty-three and life was a game she had rejected utterly. Nothing about her own situation or anyone else’s moved her in the least. A spectator distant from all turmoil and emotion, she took a theoretical interest in the play and in a sort of aside to herself registered very faintly the feeling that would have been natural to each situation had she and her fellows been real and alive and the universe of any import.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Through a mixture of incredulity, sadness and amusement, she realised that he had mistaken her for a different person, a person helpful to people. And she felt flattered and yet untouched by this mistake which was so far-fetched, as if he had thought her someone of merit, impossibly famous.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Some suffering must be clean compared with this, she thought. There was collusion here. There was nothing not depraved, perverted. There was no feeling of sufficient grace to earn the august name of suffering. And yet, she thought, I think we are probably very unhappy.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Perhaps this was the greatest difference of all between people? It did seem to be a very great difference. How odd—all to look like one and yet to be, in a sense, two species. This permanent awareness of what was so, regardless of her whims of the moment, regardless of what it would be pleasant to believe, or not pleasant, this solid bedrock was what she was, what she was about. What could there be in its place if you were differently constituted? What use (the question came) had she ever made of this supposedly valuable possession? What use did she ever intend to make of it? Oh, some. Some use, she promised. Because she could not die till that was done. And she sighed and frowned in abstraction, understanding what did not seem very understandable: that she was not yet good enough to die, could not afford it yet on any account.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“It was such a relief to think about world affairs! Like coming out of solitary confinement.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“And it seemed that in finding the words for this question she had found them for all longing, and every question. For this meant everything. I want to be in the presence of someone good.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“What was she looking for? What did she miss? And why did the world and the weirdness and significance of captives, cats, faces and buildings strike her with fresh surprise daily, as if she had arrived from another time and place, expecting the earth to be much different? We could do anything, and we do this, what we do do.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“It is a wonder of the world to notice how fundamentally people change from one second to the next when they are given their own way.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“No action of Laura’s now, no word, ever lacked this air of having been chosen with discretion, after prolonged thought. Deliberation was anathema to Clare. In her experience it was synonymous with hypocrisy, equivocation, as if the real which was always at hand, and clear to see, spontaneously presenting itself for use, was always mechanically rejected in favour of some cautious piece of strategy, some much-thumbed grubby piece of thought.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“No, it seemed that there was more than that to restrain her among many factors, fear of contamination. She would not willingly have touched a box of matches belonging to him. So erratic, vicious and dangerous, so inaccessible to reason and human feeling had he demonstrated himself to be, and so bent on the spiritual destruction of those about him, that the very artifacts he handled seemed to sicken. His eyes, merely by looking, spread the contagion, so that the fabric and foundations of the house were diseased; the silver Jaguar that he drove as though it were a weapon of war was diseased. She herself. She herself. She shuddered. What wasn’t? The wind? The sky?”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“A most tremendous inertia which sprang from the paralysis of a will too long suppressed shackled her. She could do nothing. The habit of living each day as it came, grateful, after it had passed, for any hours that gave even the appearance of concord, had rendered her incapable of forethought. She had achieved this state with much painless suffering, committing murder by proxy. In truth, at the deepest level, she did not know what to do, and knew what she would do.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Listen. There are people who are saints, and temples thousands of years old, Laura, and camel trains crossing the deserts. Cities are broken to pieces, and people are climbing mountains and making pilgrimages to Mecca. There’s beauty and terror and so much more than we know. Nothing is this small.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“If she lied or acted all her life, no one she knew or ever had known would recognise the fact; alternatively, when she was herself, no one recognised that either.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Where’s your female Einstein, your Rembrandt? Women! Why were all the Greek and Roman statues of men? Because male beauty is superior in every way”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“social life—but what it turned out to be like was waiting at a bus stop, a grimy bus stop with grit and traffic tearing past.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“In some new way, since they had come to live in this house, it seemed to Clare that words, silences, gestures and the absence of gestures, being present, being absent, had all come to seem more meaningful than they were, to mean something other than what they meant. There was the effect of striking C natural and hearing B flat, so that the mind registered small disagreeable shocks constantly, as if a scientist with a new machine was playing tricks on it.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Brought together as haphazardly as sardines in a net, as slippery and indifferent, she and her associates parted almost without noticing they did.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower