The Whalebone Theatre Quotes

“War might depend on people who don’t flinch, but humanity rather relies on those who do.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“knew EVERYTHING when I was twelve years old, and with each year of my life, I know a little less, and there is a freedom in that.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Their most-loved books have been read so many times, they only have to look at the covers to know how it feels to be enclosed within them.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“On clear days, the sea is an impossible turquoise, and when the sun sets, the sky is streaked with extravagant pinks and purples, lighting up the mountainous islands they can see from the shore. At these times, Cristabel feels an intense happiness; an almost painful awareness of being alive and breathing.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“for all she resents the unfair advantages given to the opposite sex, she does not want to be a man, she only wants it not to matter that she is a woman.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“For a fortunate few, war allows us to rise in ways that would otherwise be impossible. We can bring the very best of us to bear.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Love is stubborn.” “What do you mean?” “I mean, even when you’re standing in the rubble, you can usually convince yourself it’s habitable, that with a good rug you could make it homely,”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Without passion we are only machines.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“I always go back to Jane Austen when I want to feel better about the world. She tidies things up for me.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“as if she is, if not exactly returning to herself, then arranging to meet herself, a little further on. —”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Flossie finds that letting go of wishes is not always a relief, more a parting. The wish still exists, it has simply taken another road. She can sometimes see it, over in the distance, waving from a high hill. The trick, the task, is to continue on her path, even so.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Chitchat! Even the phrase is infuriating. Offering inoffensive pieces of conversation to bachelors as if they were babies who needed their food chopped up.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Digby, who is not really her brother, and actual Digby, her most faithful and cheering companion. He is a drawing scribbled over and screwed up and unscrewed again and kept in a pocket always. His presence in her life like a dog sleeping on the end of your bed: a loyalty so fond and constant, you only notice it on the rare occasions when you wake up and it’s gone, and then all you want to do is get up and find it,”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“If she could look her loss in the face, what shape would it be? What colour? Bright blue. Sky blue. Hope blue. A love as big as the sky. How
bright and fierce it is. How impossible to extinguish. To think of it gone feels like screaming. He is her brother. He is someone she willed into being. He is inside her and outside her. And she would take all that she has ever had and throw it away in an instant, to be there on the gurney, to fight in his place. She would give away having ever known him to keep him from—she will not think of the words. There will be no words that imply an ending.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“When she stands in its ribcage, she recalls how she had once placed her hands on the outside of its body, and now she is inside its body, in the space created by its absent life. When she looks up, she sees the bones arching over her head against the vast starry sky like roof beams, like the skeletal beginnings of a strange new home. Something she has made from what was washed up, unwanted; something created from what was left to her.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“No, no, no.
Flossie raises her eyebrows. "That sounds like one of those no's."
"What no's?"
"The kind that don't feel confident on their own, that need a few friends around them.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Digby says, 'I simply want to choose my own life. Don't you?'
'I have no idea what it would be,' she replies.
'Not knowing is by far the better option,' he says.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Her body was no longer something amenable that transported her rapidly about the place, like an excellent rickshaw; it was something forced to be stationary, something to be looked at.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“swords of sunlight slant downwards through the trees.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“This is the rule I have for my salons also. I do not care what your interests are—tennis or architecture or playing the bassoon—as long as you have one.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“The children observe this too: his ability to acknowledge futility yet have a go anyway. To set off optimistically even if you soon find yourself back at the start. They are accustomed to all their attempts at anything being marked with a definite cross or a tick, but Taras does not appear to mind a cross. He even gives them to himself. It is a topsy-turvy way of thinking, but there is an intriguing ease to it, a widening of space. It seems a good way to do things, especially now, in this summer of laxity, this time of slack water.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“The war and all its deprivations seem relentless, but for Cristabel, there is a strange and guilty thrill running through it, for it is exactly this thinning of the ordinary that allows the unordinary through. How can it be that she loves this murky, blighted and pockmarked England more than she loved its peaceful green predecessor? Because she can drive a car through it, in a uniform; because she can be with a man in it, without marriage;”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“She realizes that, for all she resents the unfair advantages given to the opposite sex, she does not want to be a man, she only wants it not to matter that she is a woman.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Look at Cristabella. She is already at work. Picturing her future productions. The American is right to say love inspires art, but not only love. Art inspires art. Anger, hatred, hunger – these can also inspire. But whatever it is, however it comes, there always is the work. The work of art is never done. Even when my hands are empty, I am still painting.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Once you learn to embrace life without fretting about money, you open yourself up to fate.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“A feverish descent is rather attractive--a sudden and virulent end possessing the body as swiftly and irrevocably as love.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Their most-loved books have been read so many times, they only have to look at the covers to know how it feels to be enclosed within them. But the worlds contained within the books do not remain between the covers. They seep out and overlay the geography of their lives.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Bring a picnic, bring a rug, bring a lap to lie on, a head to lie upon your lap.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“m’appelle”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“A place where exiles gather to talk of passion.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre