Margo Lanagan Quotes

There is something about talking in the night, with the shreds of sleep around your ears, with the silences between one remark and another, the town dark and dreaming beyond your own walls. It draws the truth out of you, straight from its little dark pool down there, where usually you guard it so careful, and wave your hands over it and hum and haw to protect people's feelings, to protect your own ... You can bring out the jaggedest feelings - if you are my wife and know how to state them calm - into the night quiet. They will float there for consideration, harming no one.

Nothing in my tale seemed to surprised the woman. The cat, on the other hand, seemed not to find a word of it credible.

It is only, she thought, that I thought you brought my bear, and life lit up for a moment. And now it is returned to its usual dimness, which truly I had thought was bright enough for me.

There's this assumption that all children have the luxury of a childhood where their innocence is always respected and their main occupation is pleasant play - at the age of 18 or 21, they are then thrust into the real world and shown its uglier side, but not before.

You are pure-hearted and lovely, and you have never done a moment's wrong. But you are a living creature, born to make a real life, however it cracks your heart.

My mum was a librarian, and she brought home a lot of interesting books, and we just read and read. I suppose I didn't really think I could be a writer myself until I was working in editing in my 20s and discovered that actually, the books that came in were not very much like published books.

These words came, quite clear, like small, evil people, across the cobbles to Branza's ankles, where they stood and smirked up at her.

How different other families were, the shape of them, the things they presumed, the children that grew up in them.

The night is suddenly vaster, colder, clearer.
All the stars zing; the mountains glitter; towns and villages gather like bright mould in the valley-seams and along the coasts.
Every movement in byre and bunny-hole, of leaf against leaf, of germ in soil and stream, turns and gleams and laminates every other, the whole world monstrously fancy, laced tight together, yet slopping over and unraveling in every direction, a grand brilliant wastage of the living an the dying.

As if the world were a pot on the boil and someone had taken its lid off and let the steam pour up wildly.

I'm a very promiscuous reader. My dad's a big science fiction fan, so I'd read 'Dune,' and 'Watership Down' and 'The Lord Of The Rings.'

How sweet it was to be scolded by such a tiny.

He was fine, and foreign, and he did not belong here. I held him close, not crushing, not waking him, letting him sleep, and I suffered. I had never felt such feelings before. I would do anything for him; I would do anything. Anything that was asked of me, that would increase his happiness or health, I would do, and willingly. So I told myself, rocking him, the winter sky white at the window.

What about the world do you most love?
The fact that I'm not here by myself.
-from interview by Jeff Vandermeer in Clarkesworld magazine

How could a person be clumsy, just standing? And yet she felt she was, as clumsy as one of those blocks of boxwood being seasoned there, unshaped, indelicate.

I had know it and never known it.

How on earth do people imagine we equip children for life if we never show them the sorts of issues other people encounter, if we never talk through with them how they might deal with difficulty or violence or unexpected shocks and surprises?

With her heels kicking the stone's side high above the ground, Branza was a girl again, though she was full-grown long ago; though the years had accumulated behind her in their great pointless pile.

The scents of these three, for instance, were so distinct, though they were clearly a family: the dark girl more savory and the golden-haired one more honeylike and they woman sweetest of all- I could not place what flower it was she recalled to me, or what sweetmeat.

Home is home, no? - whatever layabouts you live with, whatever tempers and timidities. I was glad to glimpse them, and glad to go to my own bed among them, with the right smell and the right hollows holding me ...

But how could they be tormenters if Branza refused to be tormented by them?

Now you are in the true world, and a great deal more is required of you. Here you must befriend real wolves, and lure real birds down from the sky. Here you must endure real people around you, and we are not uniformly kind; we are damaged and impulsive, each in our own way. It is harder. It is not safe. But it is what you were born to.

You must watch and wait, Branza, to see what powers you have and don't have. It is not like home. We ruled there. Everything fell into place around what we wanted. Here, we are not the only ones wanting, and we must make room for other people's desires.

I felt freed to please myself, to find my way as I would, in a world that was much vaster than I had realized before, in which I was but one star-gleam, one wavelet, among multitudes. My happiness mattered not a whit more than the next person's - or the next fish's, or the next grass-blade's! - and not a whit less.

And then she fell, from standing, foot-fins together, straight into the wavelets, where she was now seal, and she flung herself down toward the deeper water.

But heart's desires? My dear, I see by your misery - by this very request you are making - that you know more of true men's and women's hearts than once you did, than your mother's world permitted you to see. Such chipped and cracked and outright broken things they are, are they not? They have their illnesses too, and their impulses. And hearts are not always connected well to minds, and even if they are, minds are not always clear and commonsensical. A heart may desire a thing powerfully indeed, but that heart's desire might be what a person least needs, for her health, for her continuing happiness.

Life is so long, and too hard, and then it ends so cruel and sudden!

You are pure-hearted, Branza, and lovely, and you have never done a moment's wrong. But you are a living creature, born to make a real life, however it cracks your heart. However sweet that other place was, it was not real. It was an artifact of your mam's imagination; it was a dream of hers and a desire; you could not have stayed there forever and called yourself alive. Now you are in the true world, and a great deal more is required of you. Here you must befriend real wolves, and lure real birds down from the sky. Here you must endure real people around you, and we are not uniformly kind; we are damaged and impulsive, each in our own way. It is harder. It is not safe. But it is what you were born to. (357)

All the expressions that are possible crossed its face, as if its thoughts were wise and limitless one moment, daft and animal the next. And Liga too was pulled towards awe, that this little girl-thing gave off such an air of being entitled, and then towards pity at its abjectness and its frailty and-how soft it was, the surface of it, and so warm! She could not believe the tiny makings of its mouth, or its perfected eyelashes, its ears like uncrumpling buds, all down and tenderness. She was full of the joy of her father being gone-that she could sit like this all night if she wanted, not bothered or harangued, without a remark from any other person, and watch this creature busy with its morsel of life, its scrap of sleep, its breaths light as moth-wings lifting its narrow red chest.

Seals do not sit about and tell, the way people do, and their lives are not eventful in the way people's are, lines of story combed again and again, in the hope that they will yield more sense with every stroke.

You may never be entirely happy; few people are. You may never achieve your heart's desire in this world, for people seldom do. Sit by enough deathbeds, Branza, and you will hear your fill of stories of missed chances, and wrong turnings, and spurned opportunities for love. It is required of you only to be here, not to be happy.