Quotes from Mary O'Hara

Looking backward through life, one can see the points of change like great locks through which one glides on a flood wave, so smoothly, on such irresistible power that one is hardly aware of any movement. But life is never the same again. One has gone through the lock and lives on a new level.

I'll go on writing till the end of my days. I have been writing too long to stop.

Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story. Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

If you have a difficult decision to make, never force it, Rob had told his boys. Weigh each alternative singly, without prejudice. If they seem to balance evenly, no advantage one way or the other, do not be deceived. There is an advantage one way or the other. If you wait long enough, it will become apparent to you and suddenly the decision will be made without difficulty, and it will be right.

To learn all that a horse could teach was a world of knowledge, but only a beginning. Look into a horse's eye and you instantly know if you can trust him.

She wondered if Howard, if Ken, would ever know love as she knew it. How would it come to them? It comes, she thought, not as affection or admiration, or any sentiment, but as if one suffered a blow, an impact; as if two elements rushed together and became one. It is all one can do to hold up under it. One is changed, and struggles along as a blinded, bewildered, changed being.

A dreamer-you know-it's a mind that looks over the edges of things.

Love cannot survive if you just give it scraps of yourself, scraps of your time, scraps of your thoughts.