Quotes from Elizabeth Hay

She would always be living her life backwards, she realized, trying to regain something perfect that she'd lost.

She would always be living her life backwards, she realized, trying to regain something perfect that she'd lost.

You stand next to the sea and you're in touch with all your longings and all your losses.

And when is it ever convincing, the belief others have in your abilities? You know perfectly well they can't see the mess inside you.

A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone, and it's marvelous for the stone and marvelous for the teacher.

Oh Harry," [Gwen] said. "I wish I were a different kind of person." What kind of person, he wanted to know. "Someone," she said slowly, "who truly loves life." He was still looking at her, still cradling his glasses in his left hand. He said, "You're the kind of person who never stops trying.

We look so very different from the way we sound. It's a shock, similar to hearing your own voice for the first time, when you're forced to wonder how the rest of you comes across if you sound nothing like the way you think you sound. You feel dislodged from the old shoe of yourself.

How attraction works, making one's body almost painfully alive and one's thoughts concentrated, also painfully. And the truth of these powerful attractions - they have their own morality and nothing else matters.

The older you get, the closer your loves are to the surface . She was breathing rarefied air, the ether you come upon at high altitudes. I understood finally how long-held grievances and petty smallnesses might get burned off, and pure creativity and humour remain.

You see the same plain landscape day after day, and then one day, perhaps it's the play of light or the time of year, you find it beautiful and other landscapes at fault. So it must be with fashion. Ordinary judgement falls into abeyance and something else, some bewitchment, takes over. How else to explain the appeal of garments that in a few years look so ridiculous?

And then he only had eyes for the pie. Watch any man, he could be ninety years old and drooling spit, but at the sight of homemade pie every last one of his wits will spring to attention.

I usually describe my father as a man given to impenetrable solitude. If I turn the phrase I can apply it to Johnny. Impenetrable happiness. For a long time I couldn't enter his life because his happiness, or appearance of happiness - his unending smiles - locked the door. An ingenious strategy, to surround the thorns with a castle.

A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone, and it's marvellous for the stone and marvellous for the teacher.

her voice sounded like a tarnished silver spoon.

When you take things personally, she knew, the world becomes very small. It is you and nothing is smaller. When you manage not to do that, the world opens wide.

So how did you get to be so wise?" It seemed she might not answer his question, but she did. "I read, she smiled, and he chuckled. Small-town honesty. He could recognize it a mile away. Small-town honesty, and big city drive.

The studio was connected by a picture window to master control, which was connected in the same way to the announce booth and the editing booth beyond that. She could see the length of the little station and into the hallway, too. And thus she was inducted into the visibility and invisibility of radio, the intimacy and the isolation.

But some feelings take a long time, they sort of grow behind your back. You turn around thirty years later and there they are.

The mistakes don't matter," he informed her one night after she stumbled over a station ID and apologized on air. "It's the recovery that counts." If she had a nickel for every one of his smiles, she'd have ten cents. She nodded sheepishly, preferring Harry's way of phrasing the same point. "I learned that a mistake is just something you go on from." Harry's advice gave her a route to follow, a path forward. Somehow Eddy managed to exchange one form of stress for another.

The present called for justice, not for nostalgia over another extravagant failure on the part of blind and incompetent white men.

Her life had seen many more sunsets than sunrises and it was probably time to even the score.

Overhead were ravens and lake gulls, all around were low hills made of the oldest rock in the world bathed by the most beautiful light on earth, and lovely miniature birches, and small flowers clinging and spreading.

His face reminded her of an open book that's fallen into a puddle.

That's always the question. How to defend yourself without being nasty.