Quotes from Mavis Gallant

Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever.

All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.

Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.

Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

She was a pretty girl, with a pointed face and blue-black hair. But she was an untidy, a dusty sort of girl, and you felt that in a few years something might go wrong; she might get swollen ankles or grow a mustache.

I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist. If it is child's play, an extension of make believe - something one is frequently assured by people who write about writing - how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a bicycle over the Alps?

Converts have it soft, said Mary. They come to it late, without ever having had the Devil under the bed. They sail in and admire the stained-glass windows. All the dirty work has been done.

If you listen at doors, you hear what you deserve.

Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.

All immigration is based on misapprehension.

A woman can always get some practical use from a torn-up life . . . She likes mending and patching it, making sure the edges are straight. She spreads the last shred out and takes its measure: 'What can I do with this remnant? How long does it need to last? A man puts on his life ready-made. If it doesn't fit, he will try to exchange it for another. Only a fool of a man will try to adjust the sleeves or move the buttons; he doesn't know how.

I am not interested in theories, she had taught herself to say, for fear of being invaded by something other than a dream. But she was not certain what she meant and not sure that it was true.

My mother has lived every day of her life as if it were preparation for some kind of crisis.

The older I get the more grateful I am not to be told how everything comes out.

Like his father, like Jules Renard, he had been carried along the slow, steady swindle of history and experience.

It happened that at the late age of twenty-seven I had run away from home. High time, you might say; but rebels can't always be choosers.

She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.

No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them, as if the half-empty cafe were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away.

There is a term for people caught on a street crossing after the light has changed: pedestrian-traffic residue.

Spring had been the season for dying in the old days. Invalids who had struggled through the dark comfort of winter took fright as the night receded.

When workers are asked, in interviews, what they think of the students, they invariably refer to them as our future bosses, and say they hope this experience will make better chefs of them than their fathers have been. French Revolution all for nothing?

She could have lived in comfort, but I doubt if it occurred to her to try.