Quotes by Gail Jones

“Im not a chef, Im a cook. A chef is someone who spends a lot of money, my mother taught me.”

“They got us through to the finish line.”

“I knew a lot of other people who had stroke. I wanted to help those people by doing a marathon.”

“We received no negative comments and after reviewing the information from the public hearing last week, we concluded the fire district will be a benefit to Rock Creek and to the county as a whole.”

Camus had said in his Carnets that the lives of others appear always, from the outside, to have a completion our own dismally lacks. Only when we understand this as a projection - that our lives, too, are unclosed and contingent - do we approach maturity. Alice felt immature. She felt that she was a spy in the cold.

Shifts within friendships happen in imperceptible increments. There is distance, then assurance. Misconjecture, caution, gradual convergence. So much depends on the respect accorded to vulnerability.

In photographs taken from the sky, cities resembled circuit boards. It was no surprise, really, that there were sparky misfirings, dangerous connections. Even traffic, Alice concluded, set up a kind of static in the air, let loose vibrations and uncontainable agitation. Freighted with more than they could absorb, with city intentions, citizens moved in designs of inexplicable purpose.