The Diviners Quotes

“the infinite capacity of humans to wound one another without meaning or wanting to”
― Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

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

“We think there is *one* planet called Earth, but there are thousands, even *millions*, like a snake shedding its skin every so often, but with all the old skins still bunched around it. You live inside the creature for quite a while, so it comes as a shock to find you're living now in one of the husked-off skins, and sometimes you can touch and know about the creature as it is now and sometimes you can't.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

“Because they don't know [the anger is] there inside them. [...] They think they are sweet reasonableness, and it's you that's in the wrong, just by being, and not being like them, or looking like them, or wanting their kind of life.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

“Look ahead into the past, and back into the future, until the silence.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

“Whatever is happening to Pique isn’t what I think is happening, whatever that may be. What happened to me wasn’t what anyone else thought was happening, and maybe not even what I thought was happening at the time. A popular misconception is that we can’t change the past–everyone is constantly changing their own past, recalling it, revising it. What really happened? A meaningless question. But one I keep trying to answer, knowing there is no answer.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

“So we troop out to the coast, and every time we meet someone from back home we fall on their necks and weep. Stupid, eh?

Neither of them think it is stupid. You Can’t Go Home Again, said Thomas Wolfe. Morag wonders now if it may be the reverse which is true. You have to go home again, in some way or other.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

“The river flowed both ways.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

“The new image, courtesy of Bernice, does not actually alter Morag’s social life out of all recognition. Still, she is asked out several times, albeit by boys in whom she is not interested. She feigns interest, though. Aims to please. She would go out with Dracula if he asked her, probably. This is a despicable attitude to have. She has it. It is not the loneliness of not going out which she cannot bear. She is in fact rarely lonely when alone. It is the sense of being downgraded, devalued, undesirable. She knows men feel pain, too. But does not yet wholly believe it, never having really seen it.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

“Why doesn't Prin go and get her own goddamn blistering bloody shitty jelly doughnuts?”
― Margaret Laurence, The Diviners