Quotes from Mary Lawson

We are all bumbling along,side by side, week in, week out, our paths similar in some ways and different in others, all apparently running parallel. But parallel lines never meet.

Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all

Suddenly he saw himself as others in the crowd must surely see him; a silent, solitary figure, standing apart from the rest. He looked out at the hoardes of singing, laughing people and felt more alone than he'd ever felt in his life. Was this how it was going to be then? Was this who he was? A man apart from his fellows, making the journey through life alone?

He'd assumed that you went to school because you had to learn things, starting off with the easy stuff and moving on to the bigger issues, and once you'd learned them that was it, the way ahead opened up and thereafter life was simple and straightforward. What a joke. The older he got, the more complicated and obscure everything became.

We are all bumbling along,side by side, week in, week out, our paths similar in some ways and different in others, all apparently running parallel. But parallel lines never meet.

You'd have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn't seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, it's deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall.

Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all

Laurie was just one more dropped stitch in a family tapestry already full of holes.

Feeling must have rendered her numb.

That last stretch of the journey from Toronto to Crow Lake always takes me by the throat. Partly it's the familiarity; I know every tree, every rock, every boggy bit of marshland so well, that even though I almost always arrive after dark I can feel them around me, lying there in the darkness as if they were my own bones.

I would like to be able to say that I threw myself into the spirit of it all, but the truth is, I still felt a bit dazed. A bit abstracted. It's going to take time, I guess. If you've thought in a certain way for many years, if you've had a picture in your mind of how things are and that picture is suddenly shown to be faulty, well, it stands to reason that it will take a while to adjust. And during that time, you're bound to feel … disconnected

Good luck. Maybe that's all it was. Maybe the whole of life depended not on how hard you tried, how determined you were, how sensible, how smart: maybe the whole shooting match depended on luck.

Matt had told me that cold was just the absence of heat, but it didn't feel like that. It felt like a presence. It felt stealthy, like a thief. You had to wrap your clothes tight around you or it would steal your warmth, and when all your warmth was gone you'd just be a shell, empty and brittle as a dead beetle.

It was so easy for women,their arms opened out instinctively and they gathered in whatever hurt there was and that was that, they didn't even have to think about it.

Most children suffer from a crippling lack of stimulation. The brain is like any other muscle; use it, and it develops. Ignore it, and it atrophies.

children have very little concept of time. Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all.

he could see now that it was possible; that someone might be in so much pain they couldn't even hear what anyone else said, far less be comforted by it.

They all lived in their own little clouds.

Janie gave me a pen. Mrs. Tadworth gave me a doll. Matt

Maybe it's a matter of tenses. Of grammar. Our love existed, it does exist, it will exist. On the great continuum of time, perhaps it is the tenses that will cease to be. What does the scientist in you think of that?

My Great Grandmother Morrison fixed a book-rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning, or so the story goes. And one Saturday evening she became so absorbed in her book that when she looked up she found that it was half-past midnight and she had spun for half an hour on the Sabbath Day. Back then, that counted as a major sin.

The other ponds, our pond included, are just as they have always been.