Quotes from Margaret Laurence

Privacy is a privilege not granted to the aged or the young.

Too bad to deprive them, but if a person doesn't look after herself in this world, no one else is likely to.

the infinite capacity of humans to wound one another without meaning or wanting to

Bless me or not, Lord, just as You please, for I'll not beg.

To move to a new place -- that's the greatest excitement. For a while you believe you carry nothing with you -- all is canceled from before, or cauterized, and you begin again and nothing will go wrong this time.

Everything drifts. Everything is slowly swirling, philosophies tangled with the grocery lists, unreal-real anxieties like rose thorns waiting to tear the uncertain flesh, nonentities of thoughts floating like plankton, green and orange particles, seaweed -- lots of that, dark purple and waving, sharks with fins like cutlasses, herself held underwater by her hair, snared around auburn-rusted anchor chains.

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

My mother sighed, making me feel that I was placing an intolerable burden on her, and yet making me resent having to feel this weight. She looked tired, as she often did these days. Her tiredness bored me, made me want to attack her for it.

Women, as well as men, in all ages and in all places, have danced on the earth, danced the life dance, danced joy, danced grief, danced despair, and danced hope. Literally and metaphorically, by their very lives.

Well, you're young. You know a whole lot you won't know later on." ~ Christie Logan

Who wants tea and sympathy? Let's have coffee and sex, Stacey, eh?

It would be nice if we were different people but we are not different people. We are ourselves and we are sure as hell not going to undergo some total transformation at this point.

The struggle is not lost. I believe we have to live, as long as we live, in the expectation and hope of changing the world for the better. That may sound naive. It may even sound sentimental. Never mind: I believe it. What are we to live for, except life itself? And, with all our doubts, with all our flaws, with all our problems, I believe that we will carry on, with God's help.

I can't say it. Now, at last, it becomes impossible for me to mouth the words -- I'm fine. I won't say anything.

I stepped inside the front hall and kicked off my snow boots. I slammed the door behind me, making the dark ruby and emerald glass shake in the small leaded panes. I slid purposely on the hall rug, causing it to bunch and crinkle on the slippery polished oak of the floor.

I could not speak for the salt that filled my throat, and for anger - not at anyone, at God, perhaps, for giving us eyes but almost never sight.

Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear. I was alone, and never free, for I carried my chains within me, and they spread out from me and shackled all I touched.

Privacy is a privilege not granted to the aged or the young. Sometimes very young children look at the old, and a look passes between them, conspiratorial, sly and knowing. It's because neither are human to the middling ones, those in their prime, as they say, like beef.

As a devout Baptist, she believed it was a sin to pray for anything for yourself. You ought to pray only for strength to bear whatever the Lord saw fit to send you, she thought. I was never able to follow this advice, for although I would often feel a sense of uneasiness over the tone of my prayers, I was the kind of person who prayed frantically-"Please, God, please, please, PLEASE let Ross MacVey like me better than Mavis.

I went upstairs to my room. Momentarily I felt a sense of calm, almost acceptance. Rest beyond the river. I knew now what that meant. It meant Nothing. It meant only silence forever.

Doris is very religious. She says it is a comfort. Her minister is plump and pink, and if he met John the Baptist in tatters in the desert, stuffing dead locusts into that parched mouth for food, and blazing the New Kingdom out of those terrible eyesockets, he would faint. But so would I, likely.

Because they don't know [the anger is] there inside them. [...] They think they are sweet reasonableness, and it's you that's in the wrong, just by being, and not being like them, or looking like them, or wanting their kind of life.

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