Kathleen Winter Quotes

I think my writing process changes as I gain more life experience ... It has taken me many years to be able to write a novel that shows the points of view of people of different ages and personalities.

The politeness was unbearable. They avoided touching each other, careful as strangers on a train ... A family can go on for years without the love that once bound it together, like a lovely old wall that stays standing long after rain has crumbled the mortar.

She liked the way he chose a good coat and wore it for five years and then chose another one similar to it.

A peregrine falcon," a passenger said, "lives at 2180 Yonge Street in Toronto, on the corner of Yonge and Eglinton. It sits high on the Canadian Tire building, hunts from there, brings prey, and in full view of everyone in the offices, tears it to pieces. Blood everywhere.

Why would a white caribou come down to Beaver River, where the woodland herd lives? Why would she leave the Arctic tundra, where the light blazes incandescent, to haunt these shadows? Why would any caribou leave her herd to walk, solitary, thousands of miles? The herd is comfort. The herd is a fabric you can't cut or tear, passing over the land. If you could see the herd from the sky, if you were a falcon or a king eider, it would appear like softly floating gauze over the face of the snow, no more substantial than a cloud. "We are soft," the herd whispers. "We have no top teeth. We do not tear flesh. We do not tear at any part of life. We are gentleness itself. Why would any of us break from the herd? Break, apart, separate, these are hard words. The only reason any of us would become one, and not part of the herd, is if she were lost.

Wayne had never been able to love the dog Treadway brought home the day he dismantled the Ponte Vecchio. He wanted to love the dog but he couldn't, and he blamed his father. The dog deserved love.

He was a soft-hearted man when it came to anyone he felt was less practically talented than himself, and this covered a lot of people. He would help a man split wood, build a house, or cut a hole in the right place in the ice, not to show off his superior skills but to save the man time. He did these things out of pure helpfulness, with kindness thrown in.

Sometimes you had to be who you were and endure what happened to you, and to you alone, before you could understand the first thing about it.

He wanted to throw the pills away and wait and see what would happen to his body. How much of his body image was accurate and how much was a construct he had come to believe? He tried to see his body objectively.

Point of view is everything.