Sight Quotes

“Growing up, I said, is a solitary process of disentanglement from those who made us and the reality of it cannot be avoided but only, perhaps, deferred”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“I wonder what it says about me that I seem to feel love only in absence -- that, present, I recognise only irritation, a list of inconveniences, the daily round of washing and child teas, the mundanity of looking after, and beyond this the recollection of what went before and how nice it was to be free; but I didn't recognise my freedom then -- or wasn't free, since freedom only functions as an opposite to constraint. There were other things, then; and how can I say, now, that a different choice would have left me more content, and that I would not have felt the loss of this life as now I feel the loss of that one--”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“I read not with any particular object in mind, nor really with the intention of retaining any information about the subjects that I chose, but rather because the act of reading was a habit, and because it was soothing and, perhaps, from a lifetime's inculcated faith in the explanatory power of books, the half-held belief that somewhere in those hectares upon hectares of printed pages I might find that fact which would make sense of my growing unhappiness, allowing me to peel back the obscurant layers of myself and lay bare at last the solid structure underneath.”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“... I would like to believe that what we have made of our lives is good or at least that it is inevitable, and so I try to find in all that has happened a pattern or a thread, some shape beyond the turn of past to future. I search for meaning everywhere. It is as if I believe that I might, drawing back a swathe of cloth left in an attic, find comprehension waiting for me, and with it a final understanding of the way things are, and why, and that in doing so I might feel the fragility of things less; but there is nothing there. Meaning is not found, discovered in a cold basement with an artist lurking, or as an image unexpectedly projected on a screen, but is assigned, the task of its superimposition upon what exists no more than an inelegant scramble to keep up; and underneath it nothing but events come willy-nilly into being and our need to fill the days, decisions leading to decisions, a mapless ramble, haunting and unthought-through.”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“Now there are nights when these positions return to me, when it is my own daughter who, climbing into bed at night for comfort, curls up beside me, and I feel my body curve into the shape my mother's did; or there are the nights of illness when I sponge my child's face, smoothing damp hair back from her forehead, and I see the outline of my mother's hands beneath the skin of mine...and I hear her voice in mine performing the liturgy of endearments, those sibilant invitations to returning sleep...and through these nights which ebb and flow like tides I feel memory as enactment and my mother, my grandmother, in my hands and in my arms, a half-presence, no longer quite lost.”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“If I thought, all through those freezing months I spent alone in a house whose owner had abandoned us, that I did not grieve, then it was because I had been expecting something else -- something both larger and lesser, a monument or a mountain, simple, scaleable, and not this seeping in of space to undermine the smooth continuance of things. I had thought that loss would be dramatic, that it would be a kind of exercise, when instead it was the emptiness of everything going on before and nothing working as it ought.”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“the convenient proximity to the city which we valued in principle but rarely took advantage of—could”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“and we stood together, waiting, for what was both our end and our beginning.”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“without reflection, without the capacity to trace our lives backwards and pick the patterns out, we become liable to act as animals do, minus forethought and according to a set of governing laws which we have never taken the trouble to explore. Without reflection we do little more than drift upon the surface of things and self-determination is an illusion. We lay ourselves open to unbalance.”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“Once her thoughts broke like weather across her face, but that readable plasticity is gone and she is not so transparent: complexity has brought concealment.”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“Later, sat in rows on slat-backed chairs, they saw it: the flickering black-and-white image of Auguste holding his baby daughter up to a fishbowl, balancing the child on her feet so that she might look down at the water inside, the tumbling elision of the film's frames making manifest inside the winter darkness a months-old summer afternoon — and at the same time, 600 miles away in the Bavarian city of Wurzburg, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, chair of physics, ran through the streets to hand over a paper to the president of the university's Physical Medical Society, a first description of the X-ray.”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“John’s adolescence was marked by loss. When he was thirteen his father died, swiftly followed by his two sisters. Shortly after he turned seventeen his eldest brother, James, whose progress through his chosen medics, career had taken him to London, became unable to work due to ill health and returned to the farm, lying for days on one of the beds that pulled out from the walls of the two-roomed cottage like drawers, coughing himself to death at least while John watched or was nearby; and I find it hard to imagine, now, when death is largely hedged about with treatment plans, when it does not often come senseless out of nowhere, but can be postposted, or if not, then at least explained, what grief must have been like when that boundary was a curtain you could put your hand through. It is easy to think that when death could be so quickly turned to, a matter of mistral and all families counted lost children in their numbers, that loss must have been a blunter thing- that having so much practice, they must have been better at it, or inoculated, that it cannot have been for them such devastation, this laying waste- as the birth of a tenth child might be of less account in a busy week than the loss of a pair of, so that the date of it was not looked for until later, when it was found to have been forgotten. It is easy to think that in an age without anaesthetics, when legs might be hacked off on kitchen tables, teeth pulled sigh pliers taking gobbets of jaw and gun away with the , that pain must have been somehow a less precise, less devastating thing, the alternative being unthinkable- that it was just the same but persisting, could only be endured, to universal to allow concession; and so John Hunter watched the bodies of those he loved carried out of the tiny farmhouse one by one, making their last journey to the church, and afterwards he went about the business of his day, he went to school or to the fields, and then at last, summoned by William, the sole surviving brother he barely remembered, he went to London and, did not return.”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“Lying by Johannes in the darkness, envying him the unquestioned habit of sleep, the way he could remove himself, I wished that I might pause, take stock; that is a thought that comes back to me now: that I would like to pause pregnancy like a film, to walk away, do something else, returning later when I have had time to rest or think. I had always, before my pregnancy, regarded my body as a kind of tool, a necessary mechanism, largely self-sustaining, which, unless malfunctioning, did what I instructed of it, and so to have my agency so abruptly curtailed, revealed as little more than conceit, felt like betrayal. I no longer listened to my own command. Inside me, while I wished that I might be able to be elsewhere, that I might leave my body in the frowsty sheets and go downstairs to sit in the dark kitchen, unswollen and cool, cells split to cells, thoughtless and ascending, forming heart and lungs, eyes, ears- a hand grew nails- this child already going about its business, its still uncomprehending mind unreachable, apart.”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight