Quotes from Timothy Findley

Mi always thought of him as living in a body one size smaller than his being - part of him always rushing forward beyond the rest of him, leaving part of him behind. [...] Skin-tight, expressionless - and your self made up of dreams and stories - Boy Carlton - Boy Balfour - Boy Hannay. I know all your heroes, my dear one - I gave you the books in which you found them.

Go, he said; in peace. And sing with the whales.

You die when you can't be real, Dolly thought. When you can't see who you are and when you cannot see what is.

He was the tallest and the strongest of all the children ever born to Doctor and Mrs Noyes and the first of them to survive.

As for the present-day Festivals they were endless--blurred--going on forever so that no one knew where one had ended in the next begun.

She looked very much like one who is afraid to speak, because she might lose something precious that was hidden under her tongue.

The art of presenting oneself, he had once told Sybil, lies in creating an immediate shock which is countered by a slow retreat into custom. People never quite recover from my cravats, but they will never find the equal of my tailor. To be memorable is all, when it comes to dress.

I don't know how or why I had decided Mrs. Maddox must be a blonde - but a state of mind that produces scenarios filled with Octogenarian Lovers! and Socialites Programmed for Attack! can hardly be held responsible for the triteness of its imagery.

Cruelty was fear in disguise and nothing more. And hadn't one of Japeth's holy strangers said that fear itself was nothing more than a failure of the imagination?

The dead by the road, or on it, testify to the presence of man. Their little gestures of pain—paws, wings and tails—are the saddest, the loneliest, most forlorn postures of the dead I can imagine. When we have stopped killing animals as though they were so much refuse, we will stop killing one another. But the highways show our indifference to death, so long as it is someone else's. It is an attitude of the human mind I do not grasp. ? Timothy Findley

All you are is what you were given. All you were given is the certainty of self.

What you have to accept at the outset is this: many men have died like Robert Ross, obscured by violence. Lawrence was hurled against a wall—Scott entombed in ice and wind—Mallory blasted on the face of Everest. Lost. We're told Euripides was killed by dogs—and this is all we know. The flesh was torn and scattered—eaten. Ross was consumed by fire. These are like statements: 'pay attention!' People can only be found in what they do.

I doubt we will ever be forgiven. All I hope is – they'll remember we were human beings

People can only be found in what they do.

He said that in a way being loved is like being told you never have to die.

too much brooding, not enough doing.

Everyone who's born has come from the sea. Your mother's womb is just a sea in small. And birds come of seas on eggs. Horses lie in the sea before they're born. The placenta is the sea. Your blood is the sea continued in your veins. We are the ocean — walking on the land.

I still maintain that an ordinary human being has the right to be horrified by a mangled body seen on an afternoon walk.

You will live when you live. No one else can ever live your life and no one else will ever know what you know...

Rodwell wandered into No Man's Land and put a bullet through his ears. On Sunday, Robert sat on his bed in the old hotel at Bailleul and read what Rodwell had written. To my daughter, Laurine; Love your mother. Make your prayers against despair. I am alive in everything I touch. Touch these pages and you have me in your fingertips. We survive in one another. Everything lives forever. Believe it. Nothing dies. I am your father always.

Complaints about reality are immature.

They waited. The door did not open. The rain did not stop. The darkness made a tent and covered them completely.

Think of any great man or woman. How can you separate them from the years in which they lived? You can't. Their greatness lies in their response to that moment.

Nothing so completely verifies our perception of a thing as our killing of it.