Jo Baker

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

“Work, Mrs. Hill knew, might not be a cure for all ailments, but it was a sovereign remedy against the more brooding kinds.”

“And when he surfaces to a cramped hand, a crick in the neck, the sunlight shifted across the floor, a sore blink, he knows that even to have written this little is an excess, it is an overflowing, an excretion. Too many words. There are just too many words. Nobody wants them; nobody needs them. And still they keep on, keep on, keep on coming..”

“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.”

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