The Way the Crow Flies Quotes

“There are some stories you can't hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That's one reliable way of understanding time.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“Writing. Opening a vein in your wrist with a spoon.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“As time went by, it mattered less and less that in 1969 a rocket went from Florida to the moon and men walked there. Good men. People's dads. Those were only events, scattered in time. Draw them close, rub them between thumb and finger till they look like larvae, soften like silk, distend to knot, to weave. It takes a village to kill a child.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“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.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“She rejoins the crowd and watches with her friends, but she feels like an emptied glass - that crestfallen feeling of walking out from a movie theatre in the middle of the day, out from the intimate matinée darkness and the smell of popcorn, which is the smell of heightened colour and sound and story, into the borderless bright of day. Bereft.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“Perhaps God dropped them on their heads before they were born.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“You always run into something no matter where you go. Turns out you're someplace after all.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“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.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“Fresh sorrows reactivate old ones. We go to the same well to grieve, and it's fuller every time.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“As President Kennedy said last year in Canada’s Parliament, “Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.” The best of both worlds.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“Your children grow up, they leave you,
they have become soldiers and riders. Your mate dies after a life of service. Who knows you? Who remembers you?”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“Times like this become memories almost instantly, part of a gilded past that somehow coexists with the present. Remember whens to look back on even as they are happening, bittersweet and aglow with sunshine fading to sepia—the late September dust suspended in the wake of a passing car, leafy smell in the air, blue sky reflected in his sunglasses.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“People who can cope take responsibility for things. Which means they need to have had them coming. The alternative is too terrifying: that bad things can just happen to them. It will be you the icicle falls on from twenty storeys up. You waiting for the bus when a motorist has a stroke and mounts the curb. To have been available to disaster once means to be permanently without a roof. Unless it was somehow your fault.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“Once upon a time there was a mountain cave. And inside the cave was a treasure." There is a glint in Froelich's eye. Jack waits. Is it possible his neighbour is a little drunk? "You see Jack, it is a fact that only the bowels of the earth can provide us with the means to propel ourselves toward the sun. Someone has to forge the arrows of Apollo. Even as someone had to build the pyramids. Slaves, yes? Which one of God's angels is rich enough, do you think, to pay for our dream to fly so high we may glimpse perhaps the face of God?”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“Put the kettle on. Look out the kitchen window.
Love that remains.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies