The Dictionary of Animal Languages Quotes

“I feel joy and sorrow at once. Thinking for the first time how a work of art contains the unknown thoughts of the artist, and how everyone looking at this world will never know what was in him when this was made. Even me.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“He knows I am a lifelong insomniac. How profound working into the night has been. It always strikes me how odd it is that we live with such divisions, that we spend half our lives lying down, in blackout.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“It is only the old who look older in tragedy.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“I could never have been anything if I remained with him. Don't you see? Who wants to be a helper, merely? But I don't say this. It sounds cold when in fact the opposite is true. He eclipsed everything. I handed myself over to him and he lived in me. I found it almost impossible to do anything in his presence. It occurs to me, only now, what he gave me by not saying he loved me. My solitude. He wanted what was at the heart of me to remain my own. Being with him required all my thinking and loving and force, all the time. Everything I had. It was not pure awe, because somehow it oddly gave me strength. To see into the centre of him and then into the centre of me.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“In order to forget one life, you need to live at least one other life. The young can withstand the shock of love because another life is still possible. It is only the old who die of heartbreak.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“We are so rarely left alone to love what we want to love, I say. Happiness comes from accepting the world the way it is. I've worked against this notion my whole life.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“We grant men a right to solitude, why can't we do the same for women? I exist more complete in it.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“Routine lures you, it makes you feel your own identity. Though I often think the opposite. That in repetition, you can lose sight of yourself.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“So much of making something out of life comes from the physical world, from really looking at everything. The smell after rain, trees illuminated in a storm, the sound of a screen door, the first star, all the things that compose your existence moment to moment. It forces you to live in the present, which is the only thing I've ever known to stop the sinking fear of death.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“You cannot understand stillness when you have the full range of motion. We are all just bodies when it comes down to it. Though when you grow old, you are edged out of even that. How little you are able to inhabit it. You notice that pleasures always involve verbs.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“I've never understood why everyone know know that women are the ones who convey things in the most interesting ways, I say. We have always observed. We have been used to no audience and that has given us room to really see.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages