Loons Margaret Laurence Quotes

Even if heaven were real, and measured as Revelation says, so many cubits this wayand that, how gimcrack a place it would be, crammed with its pavements of gold, its gates of pearl and topaz, like a gigantic chunkof costume jewelry. ~ Margaret Laurence

What goes on inside isn't ever the same as what goes on outside. ~ Margaret Laurence

Where I'm going, anything may happen. Nothing may happen. Maybe I will marry a middle-aged widower, or a longshoreman, or a cattle-hoof-trimmer, or a barrister or a thief. And have my children in time. Or maybe not. Most of the chances are against it. But not, I think, quite all. What will happen? What will happen. It may be that my children will always be temporary, never to be held. But so are everyone's.
I may become, in time, slightly more eccentric all the time. I may begin to wear outlandish hats, feathered and sequinned and rosetted, and dangling necklaces made from coy and tiny seashells which I've gathered myself along the beach and painted coral-pink with nail polish. And all the kids will laugh, and I'll laugh, too, in time. I will be light and straight as any feather. The wind will bear me, and I will drift and settle, and drift and settle. Anything may happen, where I'm going. ~ Margaret Laurence

As we grow older we should become not less radical but more so. ~ Margaret Laurence

I went upstairs to my room. Momentarily I felt a sense of calm, almost acceptance. Rest beyond the river. I knew now what that meant. It meant Nothing. It meant only silence forever. ~ Margaret Laurence

By their garbage shall ye know them," Christie yells, like a preacher, a downy preacher. "I swear, by the ridge of tears and by the valour of my ancestors, I say unto you, Morag Gunn, lass, that by their bloody goddamn fucking garbage shall ye christly well know them. ~ Margaret Laurence

I've never been able to force a novel. I always had the sense something being given to me. You can't sit around and wait until inspiration strikes, but neither can you force into being something that isn't there. ~ Margaret Laurence

As a devout Baptist, she believed it was a sin to pray for anything for yourself. You ought to pray only for strength to bear whatever the Lord saw fit to send you, she thought. I was never able to follow this advice, for although I would often feel a sense of uneasiness over the tone of my prayers, I was the kind of person who prayed frantically-Please, God, please, please, PLEASE let Ross MacVey like me better than Mavis. ~ Margaret Laurence

They remain shadows. Two sepia shadows on an old snapshot, two barely moving shadows in my head, shadows whose few
remaining words and acts I have invented. Perhaps I only want their forgiveness for having forgotten them. I remember their deaths, but not their lives. Yet they're inside me, flowing unknown in my blood and moving unrecognized in my skull. ~ Margaret Laurence

In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry. ~ Margaret Laurence

I am rampant with memory. ~ Margaret Laurence

Nothing is clear now. Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fix on a detail and see it as thought it were magnified
a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on a man's hands
or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world. The darkening sky is hugely blue, gashed with rose, blood, flame from the volcano or wound or flower of the lowering sun. The wavering green, the sea of grass, piercingly bright. Black tree trunks, contorted, arching over the river. ~ Margaret Laurence

Who wants tea and sympathy? Let's have coffee and sex, Stacey, eh? ~ Margaret Laurence

Everything drifts. Everything is slowly swirling, philosophies tangled with the grocery lists, unreal-real anxieties like rose thorns waiting to tear the uncertain flesh, nonentities of thoughts floating like plankton, green and orange particles, seaweed
lots of that, dark purple and waving, sharks with fins like cutlasses, herself held underwater by her hair, snared around auburn-rusted anchor chains. ~ Margaret Laurence

Well, you're young. You know a whole lot you won't know later on." ~ Christie Logan ~ Margaret Laurence

To move to a new place
that's the greatest excitement. For a while you believe you carry nothing with you
all is canceled from before, or cauterized, and you begin again and nothing will go wrong this time. ~ Margaret Laurence

Must've been off my head, wandering around the harbour so long. Didn't even get the nightgowns. Are the kids okay? Damn, I wish I didn't always have to be home at the right time. At the Day of Judgement, God will say Stacy MacAindra, what have you done with your life? And I'll say, Well, let's see, Sir, I think I loved my kids. And He'll say, Are you certain of that? And I'll say, God, I'm not certain about anything any more. So He'll say, To hell with you, then. We're all positive thinkers up here. Then again, maybe He wouldn't. Maybe He'd say, Don't worry, Stacy, I'm not all that certain, either. Sometimes I wonder if I even exist. And I'd say, I know what you mean, Lord. I have the same trouble with myself. ~ Margaret Laurence

How it irks me to have to take her hand, allow her to pull my dress over my head, undo my corsets and strip them off my, and have her see my blue veined swollen flesh and the hairy triangle that still proclaims with lunatic insistence a non-existent womanhood. ~ Margaret Laurence

I can't change what's happened to me in my life, or make what's not occurred take place. But I can't say I like it, or accept it, or believe it's for the best. I don't and never shall, not even if I'm damned for it. ~ Margaret Laurence

I used to think there would be a blinding flash of light someday, and then I would be wise and calm and would know how to cope with everything and my kids would rise up and call me blessed. Now I see that whatever I'm like, I'm pretty well stuck with it for life. Hell of a revelation that turned out to be. ~ Margaret Laurence

Follow your heart, and you perish. ~ Margaret Laurence

Privacy is a privilege not granted to the aged or the young. ~ Margaret Laurence

Will we ever reach a point when it is no longer necessary to say Them and Us? I believe we must reach that point, or perish. ~ Margaret Laurence

When I say "work" I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs. ~ Margaret Laurence

The infinite capacity of humans to wound one another without meaning or wanting to ~ Margaret Laurence

The dead don't bear a grudge nor seek a blessing. The dead don't rest uneasy. Only the living. ~ Margaret Laurence

I can't say it. Now, at last, it becomes impossible for me to mouth the words
I'm fine. I won't say anything. ~ Margaret Laurence

Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear. ~ Margaret Laurence

It has been our experience that American houses insist on very comprehensive editing; that English houses as a rule require little or none and are inclined to go along with the author's script almost without query. The Canadian practice is just what you would expect
a middle-of-the-road course. We think the Americans edit too heavily and interfere with the author's rights. We think that the English publishers don't take enough editorial responsibility. Naturally, then, we consider our editing to be just about perfect. There's no doubt about it, we Canadians are a superior breed! (in a letter to author Margaret Laurence, dated May, 1960) ~ Jack McClelland

Women, as well as men, in all ages and in all places, have danced on the earth, danced the life dance, danced joy, danced grief, danced despair, and danced hope. Literally and metaphorically, by their very lives. ~ Margaret Laurence

And yet, for a writer of fiction, part of the heart remains that of a stranger, for what we are trying to do is to understand those others who are our fictional characters, somehow to gain entrance to their minds and feelings, to respect them for themselves as human individuals, and to portray them as truly as we can. The whole process of fiction is a mysterious one, and a writer, however experienced, remains in some ways a perpetual amateur, or perhaps a perpetual traveller, an explorer of those inner territories, those strange lands of the heart and spirit. ~ Margaret Laurence

If I hadn't had my children, I wouldn't have written more and better, I would have written less and worse. ~ Margaret Laurence

Is it a mausoleum, and I, the Egyptiab, mummified with pillows and my own flesh, through some oversight enbalmed alive? There must be some mistake. ~ Margaret Laurence

He was a mean man, it's true, but he got ahead. A man gets on by working harder than the rest - that's what he used to say - and if he doesn't get anywhere, he hasn't a soul to blame but himself. ~ Margaret Laurence

My mother sighed, making me feel that I was placing an intolerable burden on her, and yet making me resent having to feel this weight. She looked tired, as she often did these days. Her tiredness bored me, made me want to attack her for it. ~ Margaret Laurence

It would be nice if we were different people but we are not different people. We are ourselves and we are sure as hell not going to undergo some total transformation at this point. ~ Margaret Laurence

The card-carrying furfuckers looked down their narrow green true-believer noses at Zeb and his edgy like, ~ Margaret Atwood

I prayed to what all things hold in common. I prayed to what makes life. I thought about the elements of the universe, the rocks, the stars, the air, other living things. I tried to get the perspective of what's behind all that. I prayed to the force that brings things into existence. I thought this force encompassed all it created. My God was transcendent, and my God was also immanent. God ran in my veins. God lived and died and lived again in every atom of the universe. ~ Margaret D. McGee

If Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister at the time, there would have been no Treaty of Maastricht. ~ Douglas Hurd

She began to fret about God's exact location. It was the Sunday-school teacher's fault: God is everywhere, she'd said, and Laura wanted to know: was God in the sun, was God in the moon, was God in the kitchen, the bathroom, was he under the bed? ... Laura didn't want God popping our at her unexpectedly ... Probably God was in the boom closet. It seemed the most likely place. He was lurking in there like some eccentric and possibly dangerous uncle, but she couldn't be certain whether he was there at any given moment because she was afraid to open the door. "god is in your heart", said the Sunday-school teacher, and that was even worse. If in the broom closet, something might have been possible, such as locking the door. ~ Margaret Atwood

But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are. ~ Margaret Atwood

You want the air
but not the words that come with it:
breathe at your peril. ~ Margaret Atwood