Quotes from Margaret Laurence

Follow your heart, and you perish.

When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.

It's not what we have in life but who we have in our life that matters.

Holidays are enticing only for the first week or so. After that, it is no longer such a novelty to rise late and have little to do.

As we grow older we should become not less radical but more so.

Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear.

Holidays are enticing only for the first week or so. After that, it is no longer such a novelty to rise late and have little to do.

In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.

By their garbage shall ye know them," Christie yells, like a preacher, a downy preacher. "I swear, by the ridge of tears and by the valour of my ancestors, I say unto you, Morag Gunn, lass, that by their bloody goddamn fucking garbage shall ye christly well know them.

We think there is *one* planet called Earth, but there are thousands, even *millions*, like a snake shedding its skin every so often, but with all the old skins still bunched around it. You live inside the creature for quite a while, so it comes as a shock to find you're living now in one of the husked-off skins, and sometimes you can touch and know about the creature as it is now and sometimes you can't.

Nothing is ever changed at a single stroke, I know that full well, although a person sometimes wishes it could be otherwise.

It was in an atomiser, and she used to squirt it around her bedroom after she had finished a cigarette. On these occasions, my mother always said, "Do you think we are teaching the child deception?" And Aunt Edna always replied , "No, just self-preservation.

So we troop out to the coast, and every time we meet someone from back home we fall on their necks and weep. Stupid, eh? Neither of them think it is stupid. You Can't Go Home Again, said Thomas Wolfe. Morag wonders now if it may be the reverse which is true. You have to go home again, in some way or other.

Whatever is happening to Pique isn't what I think is happening, whatever that may be. What happened to me wasn't what anyone else thought was happening, and maybe not even what I thought was happening at the time. A popular misconception is that we can't change the past–everyone is constantly changing their own past, recalling it, revising it. What really happened? A meaningless question. But one I keep trying to answer, knowing there is no answer.

they should be hidden away in an attic along with the other relics too common to be called antiques and too broken to be of any further use. Yet I was inexplicably drawn to them, too.

Look ahead into the past, and back into the future, until the silence.

Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. I wonder if she stands there yet, in memory of her who relinquished her feeble ghost as I gained my stubborn one, my mother's angel that my father bought in pride to mark her bones and proclaim his dynasty, as he fancied, forever and a day.

He was a mean man, it's true, but he got ahead. A man gets on by working harder than the rest—that's what he used to say—and if he doesn't get anywhere, he hasn't a soul to blame but himself.

Why doesn't Prin go and get her own goddamn blistering bloody shitty jelly doughnuts?

Marvin is hairy in shirtsleeves, elbows on the table. High day or holiday or Judgement Day – no difference to Marvin. He would have put his elbows on the table if he'd been an apostle at the Last Supper.

The lilacs grew with no care given them, and in the early summer they hung like bunches of mild mauve grapes from branches with leaves like dark green hearts, and the scent of them was so bold and sweet you could smell nothing else, a seasonal mercy.

The river flowed both ways.

What goes on inside isn't ever the same as what goes on outside.

I can't change what's happened to me in my life, or make what's not occurred take place. But I can't say I like it, or accept it, or believe it's for the best. I don't and never shall, not even if I'm damned for it.