Quotes from Ann-Marie MacDonald

Some people talk about children wanting to be born as though somewhere out there in the collective unconscious there's a spirit, or a thought or an idea that wants to be born. And I sometimes feel that way about stories... that they're there and they want to be told.

You can tell a lot about a person by the people who work for them.

I started my career as an actor, then morphed into a playwright who accidentally became a novelist with my first book 'Fall On Your Knees.'

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

There are some stories you can't hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That's one reliable way of understanding time.

She's no lady. Her songs are all unbelievably unhappy or lewd. It's called Blues. She sings about sore feet, sexual relations, baked goods, killing your lover, being broke, men called Daddy, women who dress like men, working, praying for rain. Jail and trains. Whiskey and morphine. She tells stories between verses and everyone in the place shouts out how true it all is.

Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.

Do you think there's such a thing as a ghost who masquerades as a person? Do you believe that there are people whose bodies are still alive here on earth but whose souls are already in hell?

They are so young, they forget that the world is not as in love with them as they are.

To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.

Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic.

It's important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.

You think you're safe. Until you see a picture like that. And then you know you'll always be a slave to the present because the present is more powerful than the past, no matter how long ago the present happened.

Materia had been just six when they docked in Sydney Harbour and her father said, 'Look. This is the New World. Anything is possible here.' She's been too young to realize that he was talking to her brother.

Lies like that are not a sin, they are a sacrifice.

The thief you must fear the most is not the one who steals mere things.

Writing. Opening a vein in your wrist with a spoon.

As time went by, it mattered less and less that in 1969 a rocket went from Florida to the moon and men walked there. Good men. People's dads. Those were only events, scattered in time. Draw them close, rub them between thumb and finger till they look like larvae, soften like silk, distend to knot, to weave. It takes a village to kill a child.

The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.

My first advantage: I have everything. My second advantage: this is just another island. My third advantage: I am bigger than it all.

She learns a valuable lesson: if you think you are good, just try doing good. You'll soon find out how inadequate your little drop of goodness is.

Having experienced her own disappearance, she is conscious of how important it is for people to be seen, so when she looks at them --even the blind one--she also looks for them, just in case they too have got lost and need finding.

Tell the story, gather the events, repeat them. Pattern is a matter of upkeep. Otherwise the weave relaxes back to threads picked up by birds to make their nests. Repeat, or the story will fall and all the king's horses and all the king's men. . . . Repeat, and cradle the pieces carefully, or events will scatter like marbles on a wooden floor.

He would have enough money...for a family that would fill his house with beautiful music and the silence of good books.