Ellie and the Harpmaker Quotes

“People say that certain sounds can melt a heart of stone. If there is anyone who has that sort of a heart―which I doubt (as far as I am aware hearts are made of fibrous materials, fluid sacs and pumping mechanisms)―if anyone does have a heart composed of granite or flint and therefore not at all prone to melting but just conceivably meltable when exposed to very beautiful sounds, then the sounds made by my cherrywood harp, I am confident, would do it. However, I had a feeling the heart of Ellie the Exmoor Housewife was completely lacking in stony components. I had a feeling it was made of much softer stuff.”
― Hazel Prior, Ellie and the Harpmaker

“Music helps fill up the holes that people leave behind”
― Hazel Prior, Ellie and the Harpmaker

“Luckily, on my own Birthday (the 21st of May), I am allowed to choose exactly what I want to do. And what I choose to do is nothing. Other people seldom take this option and so their Birthdays are fraught with difficulty.”
― Hazel Prior, Ellie and the Harpmaker

“Ellie Jacobs is hitched and I am made of all the wrong ingredients. At least we still have music.”
― Hazel Prior, Ellie and the Harpmaker

“Housewife does not mean you are married to a house. It means you are a woman who is married to a husband and your husband goes off to work every day and you don’t go off to work at all but embark on house-dusting, house-hoovering and various ironing and washing duties and other things that happen in a house, and in fact you aren’t really expected to go out of the house at all except to get yourself to a supermarket and then you go up and down the aisles with a trolley and a list, looking sad. What a lot of things are embedded in that housewife word.”
― Hazel Prior, Ellie and the Harpmaker

“Under pine trees the forest floor is nothing but old, brown pine needles, thousands and thousands of them. However, if you go to an area where our native deciduous trees are growing—the oaks, ashes, birches, hazels, hawthorns, beeches—then you see that all sorts of things thrive under their branches. There are the magical greens of the mosses and ferns, the bright white of the wood anemones, the acres of shining bluebells in May, the foxgloves in early summer. And every autumn the trees create their own rich carpet of dazzling colors.”
― Hazel Prior, Ellie and the Harpmaker

“I return to the house to fetch my shoulder bag, find my wallet at the bottom of it, take out my credit card and scrape. At last there is a hole in the ice big enough to see through.”
― Hazel Prior, Ellie and the Harpmaker