Ann-Marie MacDonald Quotes

Corruption hangs in the air around a great talent. Such a gift is unstable by nature, apt to embarrass its handlers. About her there is the whiff of the entertainer. Like vaudeville nipping the heels of grand opera. The maestro smells all this on Kathleen and cools his blood to a temperature undetectable by wild animals.

Be strong enough to carry the burden of sin that goes with doing the right thing.

Some people talk about children wanting to be born as though somewhere out there in the collective unconscious there's a spirit, or a thought or an idea that wants to be born. And I sometimes feel that way about stories ... that they're there and they want to be told.

By fall, they can read. It happened by osmosis, the way it ought to: after they have spent several months on Daddy's lap, following his spoken words with their eyes and pretending to read, their comes a day when they no longer have to pretend.

Between a mother's eyes and her son's face, there is not air. There is something invisible and invincible. Even though - or because - he will go out into the world, she will never lose her passion to protect him.

When stories are not told, we risk losing our way.

Ignore them. Don't give them the opportunity to snub you. Carry yourself like you own the place.

What to feed her is a constant conundrum. Nothing satisfies. She rolls her eyes, sighs ostentatiously, flounces from the room.

For once, Frances is stripped of irony. She is in the presence of something bigger
namely Herself. Or at least the self implied by her new body. This is how the Blessed Virgin visits us. She inhabits our own flesh and makes love out of it. Nothing is ironic in the moment of first love. And Frances is in love. With her body, and what it is bringing forth.

The moon may drive men mad but it can calm a savage girl, for it is cool, precise, it is lucid.

I thought I would get calmer, surer, but each time we come close I feel almost sick at first. As though each time vibrates with the times before. I feel a terrible sorrow coming up my throat, I don't know why. And it can only be consoled against the length of her body. Lying down with her for the first time ... all the pain I didn't know I had, till at her touch it disappeared like smoke. Is this what purgatory feels like? To burn painlessly? If so, why isn't it called heaven?

I love the buildings. They're called skyscrapers. They're the closest thing to an ocean here. But it's an ocean that goes straight up, not flat out. They say that the body of water stretching away to the east of Manhattan is the ocean but it isn't. Not my ocean, anyway. It's weird because back home I just took it for granted, my grey-green sea. Now I have a granite ocean. It gives me the same happy-sad feeling I need sometimes. When I look straight up at the buildings I can feel alone in a good way. Not in that horrible way of no one knows me.

He thought his heart would kill him, he'd had no clue what it was capable of.

An unhappily married woman is necessarily a bad cook.

James could do all this because he had made a bargain with himself: he wouldn't try to get killed, nor would he try to survive. He could do all this because he felt terribly sorry for the men he rescued. They harbored the saddest and most foolish desire of all. The desire to go on living.

I am burning. I have to live, I have to sing, I want to transform myself into a thousand different characters and carry their life with me onto the stage where it's so bright and so dark at the same time, just knowing there are three thousand people out there longing to be swept away by the passion that's about to flood out from scarlet curtains, to this I consecrate my body and my soul, I can give no more than all of myself, I feel my heart is a throbbing engine and my voice is the valve, like a wailing train, it has to sing or blow up, there's too much fuel, too much fire, and what am I to do with this voice if I can't let it out, it's not just singing. I am here as a speck, but I don't feel scared or about to be blown away, I feel like all New York is a warm embrace just waiting to enfold me. I am in love. But not with a person. I am passionately in love with my life.

Frances learns something in this moment that will allow her to survive and function for the rest of her life. She finds out that one thing can look like another. That the facts of a situation don't necessarily indicate anything about the truth of a situation. In this moment, fact and truth become separated and commence to wander like twins in a fairy-tale, waiting to be reunited by that special someone who possesses the secret of telling them apart.

It was a moment of equal parts anxiety and awe, like the striking of a wide seam of
gold. The prospector sinks to his knees--he's only been looking for coal. At a gush of
oil he'd hoot, baptize himself and buy the drinks. But the sight of gold is different. He
observes a moment's silence. Then he rises, eyes watering. How to get it properly out
of the earth? How not to be robbed in the meantime?

A war changes people in a number of ways. It either shortcuts you to your very self; or it triggers such variations that you might as well have been a larva, pupating in dampness, darkness and tightly wrapped puttees. Then, providing you don't take flight from a burst shell, you emerge from your khaki cocoon so changed from what you were that you fear you've gone mad, because people at home treat you as though you were someone else. Someone who, through a bizarre coincidence, had the same name, address and blood ties as you, but who must have died in the war. And you have no choice but to live as an impostor because you can't remember who you were before the war. There's a simple but horrible explanation for this: you were born in the war. You slid, slick, bloody and fully formed, out of a trench.
The Great War was the greatest changer of them all.

Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead.

My first advantage: I have everything. My second advantage: this is just another island. My third advantage: I am bigger than it all.

It's where she belongs, she craves the caress of the violent shore, to come alive like that once more in a clash of stone and then to die.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.

The thief you must fear the most is not the one who steals mere things.

Tell the story, gather the events, repeat them. Pattern is a matter of upkeep. Otherwise the weave relaxes back to threads picked up by birds to make their nests. Repeat, or the story will fall and all the king's horses and all the king's men ... Repeat, and cradle the pieces carefully, or events will scatter like marbles on a wooden floor.

How unhappy are they who have a gift that's left to germinate in darkness. The pale
plant will sink invisible roots and live whitely off their blood.

Perhaps God dropped them on their heads before they were born.

Writing. Opening a vein in your wrist with a spoon.

It's his last thrill and his last sting of love, as fresh and painful as youth transplanted over time and an ocean. There is nothing left for him now except to die, but that will take a while because he is a creature of habit, and he has got into the habit of being alive.

Rats may scamper across it and remain rats. Birds may fly above it and remain
birds; they may alight and tear and eat and prick up their heads to stare motionless
and beady for a moment before pecking and eating again, and remain birds. But no
man may venture into this space between the lines and remain a man. That is the
difference. No man may enter, either stealthily on his belly alone, or noisily on two
feet racing through glue with a thousand versions of himself firing, falling, on either
side as far as the eye can see, and remain a man. It is possible to become a man
once more if you make it back behind your line again, but you suspend your
humanity for your sojourn in between. That is why the place is called No Man's Land.

Kathleen is truly and utterly and completely Kathleen in New York. That's what the city does for you if it's meant for you.

Materia had been just six when they docked in Sydney Harbour and her father said, 'Look. This is the New World. Anything is possible here.' She's been too young to realize that he was talking to her brother.

The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.

He would have enough money ... for a family that would fill his house with beautiful music and the silence of good books.

Frances is feeling a familiar yet unnameably old feeling. One she hadn't known was ever hers to forget. Happiness.

Depression is anger slowed down; panic is grief speeded up.

There is love, there is music, there is no limit, there is work, there is the precious sense that this is the hour of grace when all things gather and distill to create the rest of my life. I don't believe in God, I believe in everything.

In terms of the secrets that imbue and underlie 'Fall on Your Knees', they were as much of a mystery to me as I was creating the story as they are to the readers.

I started my career as an actor, then morphed into a playwright who accidentally became a novelist with my first book 'Fall On Your Knees.'

Books were not an expense; they were an investment.

From the book:
Fall On Your Knees pg. 124
One day, I'll sit down with all my books around me, and just start reading.

Who is that in the glass? She sees herself for the first time. She doesn't require soft
light, not at her age, not with her looks, so the effect of three candles is excessively
ravishing. Her hair sparks at every brush stroke. The candlelight carves a grotto in
the gloom around her. The mirror is a sacred pool, in it she sees the future: her lips
swollen with kissing, eyes caressing, come with me to my home beneath the sea and
I will love you.
She unbuttons her nightgown. My beautiful throat. Bares a white shoulder, ohh.
Parts the fabric to reveal her breasts, sailor take warning. Her image floating just
beneath the twilight surface, tempting herself overboard.
She hovers her hand above a nipple that gathers and pleats to a point seeking heat.
Kisses her palm with one eye on the mirror. Again, this time with her tongue.
Experiments with the creation of cleavage. Arranges her hair: Gibson girl, milkmaid,
madwoman, dryad. And leaves it there, spilling over her shoulders.
It's a self-portrait and the artist is in love.

Frances is a sealed letter. It doesn't matter where she's been or who's pawed her, no one gets to handle the contents no matter how grimy the envelope. And it's for sure no one's going to be able to steam her open.

Teresa blames herself for believing that she was indispensable to Mahmoud. Pride goeth before a fall.

You think you're safe. Until you see a picture like that. And then you know you'll always be a slave to the present because the present is more powerful than the past, no matter how long ago the present happened.

She never knows when it might strike. The rage. And when it does, she loses her grip on herself - literally. At times, she could swear she sees another self - shiny black phantom, faceless, as though clad in a bodysuit - leaping out of her, pulling the rest of her in its wake. Over the edge.

Reading was such a formative part of my childhood (along with 'Loony Tunes'), that it is difficult to pin point the most influential book. But, under an interrogation light I would probably have to say 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte.

Adelaide believes that all children should have enough grown-ups around who love them so that one can tell them to fight, one can tell them not to, and one can tell them not to worry so much.

He loved her way: acting casual, working like a Trojan, singing like an angel. Not
"angelically." The voice of an angel. Winged, lethal, close to the sun.

A small grazing gesture ignites the need for closer, and breaks the surface of the water, never in you enough, gulping air, never contain you enough, on dry land now, never hold you enough, the desert heat, drink you, oasis lover shimmering under a palm, I will burn to ashes here then blow away until that merciful peak is discovered, and once that is discovered, the slow tumble back down the hill, buckets of water spilling in slow motion, streaking the sand along their way until again the gentle sway, the ocean floor, the grazing touch that reignites the sea.

She's no lady. Her songs are all unbelievably unhappy or lewd. It's called Blues. She sings about sore feet, sexual relations, baked goods, killing your lover, being broke, men called Daddy, women who dress like men, working, praying for rain. Jail and trains. Whiskey and morphine. She tells stories between verses and everyone in the place shouts out how true it all is.

Here is the place called Awake. On the other side of this line is the country of Asleep. And you see this shaded area in between? Don't linger there. It is No Man's Land.

Lies like that are not a sin, they are a sacrifice.

When will she discover that I am from a lesser race of immortals? But the high deities have always needed pixies to persuade them down to earth. When she no longer needs an intermediary, will she still love me?