Quotes from Alistair MacLeod

All of us are better when we're loved.

No one has ever said that life is to be easy. Only that it is to be lived.

And then there came into my heart a very great love for my father and I thought it was very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations.

Writers write about what worries them.

Sometimes it slanted against her window with a pinging sound, which meant it was close to hail, and then it was visible as tiny pellets for a moment on the pane before the pellets vanished and rolled quietly down the glass, each drop leaving its own delicate trickle. At other times it fell straight down, hardly touching the window at all, but still there beyond the glass, like a delicate, beaded curtain at the entrance to another room.

On a clear day you can see Prince Edward Island , we would say. Not "forever", just Prince Edward Island.

Some men," she would add in ominous seriousness, "are nice as pie in public but within their own homes they are mean and miserly to those who have to live with them all the time. No one, perhaps, knows this except those who are captive within their houses.

The "lamp of the poor" is hardly visible in urban southwestern Ontario, although there are many poor who move disjointedly beneath it. And the stars are seldom clearly seen above the pollution of prosperity.

Talking about history is not like living it, I guess. Some people have more choice than others.

Music is the lubricant of the poor.

Almost intermixed with the animals are the Masai following the grass cycle with their cattle herds, living off the milk and blood of their cows. We would go early in the morning from a base camp in Land Rovers and all-terrain vehicles, armed with cameras and binoculars. The tour operators apologized for the presence of the Masai.

Perhaps that's why he became so interested in history, […] He felt that if you read everything and put the pieces all together the real truth would emerge. It would be, somehow, like carpentry. Everything would fit together just so, and you would see in the end something like 'a perfect building called the past.

As an individual struggling with a language not his own he was difficult to dislike.

There are many things that people will do in the dark that they will not do in light.

When the Canada geese fly north in spring, there is a leader who points the way, a leader at the apex of the V as the formation moves across the land. Those who follow must believe that the leader is doing the best he can but there is no guarantee that all journeys will end in salvation for everyone involved.

Do you have children?" "Yes," I say. "Do they make their own beds?" "Well, sometimes," I reply. "You should encourage them to make their own beds," she says. "It's good training for life.

Sometimes when he would tell me those stories his eyes would fill with tears. People used to say he was sentimental, but it was because he cared. He felt everything deeply. People around here used to call a man like him 'soft.' 'Maybe so,' he used to say, 'but I'm always hard when I have to be, you know that.' He was full of little double meanings like that, my husband.

And perhaps I have tried too hard to be someone else without realizing at first what I presently am.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

No one has ever said that life is to be easy. Only that it is to be lived.

There is a kind of belief among my students that things that are true are interesting. But most things that are true are not interesting. Four pages describing how I got up and brushed my teeth in the morning would kill you.

Today there is a division between those who write about literature and those who create it. I, obviously, don't think that should be there.