Cathleen > Cathleen's Quotes

“You will live when you live. No one else can ever live your life and no one else will ever know what you know...”
― Timothy Findley, The Wars

“...with every new manoeuvre, the light was growing dimmer--fading by numbers as well as strength--and the sound could no longer be heard, but only the pulse of it--seen going out in the darkness--losing its edges--caving in at its centre--webbing, now, as if a spider was spinning against the rain--until the last few strands of brightness fell--and were extinguished--silenced and removed from life and from all that lives forever.
And the bell tolled--but the ark, as ever, was adamant. Its shape had taken on a voice. And the voice said: no.”
― Timothy Findley, Not Wanted on the Voyage

“Privacy is a privilege not granted to the aged or the young.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel

“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, A Jest of God

“So, if this were indeed my Final Hour, these would be my words to you. I would not claim to pass on any secret of life, for there is none, or any wisdom except the passionate plea of caring ... Try to feel, in your heart's core, the reality of others. This is the most painful thing in the world, probably, and the most necessary. In times of personal adversity, know that you are not alone. Know that although in the eternal scheme of things you are small, you are also unique and irreplaceable, as are all of your fellow humans everywhere in the world. Know that your commitment is above all to life itself.”
― Margaret Laurence

“What goes on inside isn't ever the same as what goes on outside.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers

“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, A Jest of God

“Privacy is a privilege not granted to the aged or the young. Sometimes very young children look at the old, and a look passes between them, conspiratorial, sly and knowing. It's because neither are human to the middling ones, those in their prime, as they say, like beef.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel

“This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“Looking down, she became aware of the water, which was covered with a film of calcinous hard-water particles of dirt and soap, and of the body that was sitting in it, somehow no longer quite her own. All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.”
― Richard Wright

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood – that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories