Literary Birthday – 16 November – Joan Lindsay

Joan Lindsay was born 6 November 1896 and died 23 December 1984.

Joan Lindsay Quotes

1. Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place. Picnic at Hanging Rock
2. Time – whether you are burning it up or falling in love or spreading it out thin in a dentist’s waiting room – is a commodity that cannot be weighed out and measured by clocks. Time without Clocks
3. Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Picnic at Hanging Rock
4. Nobody can be held responsible for the pranks of destiny. Picnic at Hanging Rock
5. As always, in matters of surpassing human interest, those who knew nothing whatever either at first or even second hand were the most emphatic in expressing their opinions; which are well known to have a way of turning into established facts overnight. Picnic at Hanging Rock
6. Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different “realities”. Picnic at Hanging Rock

Source for quotes: Goodreads

Joan Lindsay was an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and visual artist. In the 1920s she contributed short stories and articles to newspapers and periodicals, in particular the Sydney journal Home. Many of her stories remained unpublished. In her later years, she published Time without Clocks (a semi-autobiographical account of the early years of her marriage to artist Sir Daryl Lindsay), Facts Soft and Hard (1964), and her most famous book, Picnic at Hanging Rock (a novel detailing the vanishing of three schoolgirls and their teacher one summer). Her last published work, Syd Sixpence, was written for children.

Source for image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joan_Lindsay_enhance_crop_1925.png
State Library of Victoria Collections, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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