“You see the suffering of children all the time nowadays. Wars and famines are played out before us in our living rooms, and almost every week there are pictures of children who have been through unimaginable loss and horror. Mostly they look very calm. You see them looking into the camera, directly at the lens, and knowing what they have been through you expect to see terror or grief in their eyes, yet so often there’s no visible emotion at all. They look so blank it would be easy to imagine that they weren’t feeling much.
And though I do not for a moment equate what I went through with the suffering of those children, I do remember feeling as they look. I remember Matt talking to me--- others as well, but mostly Matt--- and I remember the enormous effort required even to hear what he said. I was so swamped by unmanageable emotions that I couldn’t feel a thing. It was like being at the bottom of the sea.”
― Mary Lawson, quote from Crow Lake
“We are all bumbling along,side by side, week in, week out, our paths similar in some ways and different in others, all apparently running parallel. But parallel lines never meet.”
― Mary Lawson, quote from Crow Lake
“Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all”
― Mary Lawson, quote from Crow Lake
“The lake hadn’t been frozen long and of all them had been expressly forbidden to go out on it, but Norman Pye, who was older than the rest of them, said that it would be safe if they slid out on their bellies. So they did. “We thought it was exciting as all get out,” Miss Vernon said. “We could hear the ice cracking but it didn’t give, and we slid across it like seals. Oh, it was tremendous fun. The ice was clear as glass and you could see right to the bottom. All the stones lying there, brighter and more colourful than they ever are when you look through the water. You could even see fish swimming about. And then all at once there was this loud crack and the whole sheet gave way, and there we were in the water.”
― Mary Lawson, quote from Crow Lake
“Laurie was just one more dropped stitch in a family tapestry already full of holes.”
― Mary Lawson, quote from Crow Lake
“I would like to be able to say that I threw myself into the spirit of it all, but the truth is, I still felt a bit dazed. A bit abstracted. It's going to take time, I guess. If you’ve thought in a certain way for many years, if you’ve had a picture in your mind of how things are and that picture is suddenly shown to be faulty, well, it stands to reason that it will take a while to adjust. And during that time, you’re bound to feel … disconnected”
― Mary Lawson, quote from Crow Lake
“Janie gave me a pen. Mrs. Tadworth gave me a doll. Matt”
― Mary Lawson, quote from Crow Lake
“Most children suffer from a crippling lack of stimulation. The brain is like any other muscle; use it, and it develops. Ignore it, and it atrophies.”
― Mary Lawson, quote from Crow Lake
“My Great Grandmother Morrison fixed a book-rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning, or so the story goes. And one Saturday evening she became so absorbed in her book that when she looked up she found that it was half-past midnight and she had spun for half an hour on the Sabbath Day. Back then, that counted as a major sin.”
― Mary Lawson, quote from Crow Lake
“Matt had told me that cold was just the absence of heat, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like a presence. It felt stealthy, like a thief. You had to wrap your clothes tight around you or it would steal your warmth, and when all your warmth was gone you’d just be a shell, empty and brittle as a dead beetle.”
― Mary Lawson, quote from Crow Lake
Mary Lawson
Born place: in Blackwell, Ontario, Canada
Born date January 1, 1946
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“Buvau jaunas, jaunesnis nei maniau. Ir vis dėlto mano naivumas buvo jau senas ir be iliuzijų. Tiesą pasakius, jis amžinas: įžvelgiu jį kiekvienoje naujoje kartoje, pradedant 1947 metų Sen Žermen de Prė "žiurkėmis" ir baigiant Kalifornijos beat generation, pas kuriuos kartais apsilankau, nes man smagu kitose vietose ir kituose veiduose atpažinti grimasas, kurias darydavau dvidešimtmetis.”
― Romain Gary, quote from Promise at Dawn
“You could pretend that Guenever was a sort of man-eating lioncelle herself, or that she was one of those selfish women who insist on ruling everywhere. In fact, this is what she did seem to be to a superficial inspection. She was beautiful, sanguine, hot-tempered, demanding, impulsive, acquisitive, charming - she had all the proper qualities for a man-eater. But the rock on which these easy explanations founder, is that she was not promiscuous. There was never anybody in her life except Lancelot and Arthur. She never ate anybody except these. And even these she did not eat in the full sense of the word. People who have been digested by a man-eating lioncelle tend to become nonentities - to live no life except within the vitals of the devourer. Yet both Arthur and Lancelot, the people whom she apparently devoured, lived full lives, and accomplished things of their own.
She lived in warlike times, when the lives of young people were as short as those of airmen in the twentieth century. In such times, the elderly moralists are content to relax their moral laws a little, in return for being defended. The condemned pilots, with their lust for life and love which is probably to be lost so soon, touch the hearts of young women, or possibly call up an answering bravado. Generosity, courage, honesty, pity, the faculty to look short life in the face - certainly comradeship and tenderness - these qualities may explain why Guenever took Lancelot as well as Arthur. It was courage more than anything else - the courage to take and give from the heart, while there was time. Poets are always urging women to have this kind of courage. She gathered her rose-buds while she might, and the striking thing was that she only gathered two of them, which she kept always, and that those two were the best.”
― T.H. White, quote from The Ill-Made Knight
“(pg.31)
"As it was, my first days on Earth were somewhat anticlimactic. Mother and Father seemed so happy tempting and corrupting that I didn't want to interrupt them. But the fact was that I hadn't the slightest clue what to do with myself. I tried to convince cows to take over the world, to rampage across the fields slaughtering all in their wake, to start a new religion of udder worship, to build cities devoted to the consumption of grass, their aqueducts running with fresh milk. I even prepared a pictorial presentation of cows traveling into outer space aboard butter-powered space churns, but the cows seemed unconvinced, and soon returned to wondering how many stomachs they had. The current belief was seventeen. Cows:Unambitious.”
― quote from Death: A Life
“You’ll never find a worse critic than the one inside your own skin, or a more difficult one to silence,” I told Piaras, by means of explanation. “The best you can hope for is to teach it some manners.”
― Lisa Shearin, quote from Magic Lost, Trouble Found
“لم أكن أحسب نفسي أديباً شاعراً. فما كنت أكتبه من حين إلى آخر كان من قبيل الصحافة المسلية، لا من الأدب. لكني كنت فيما بيني وبين نفسي أحبس أملاً في أن تتاح لي في يوم من الأيام فرصة خلق شيء من الأدب، نشيد عظيم جرئ للحنين والحياة”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from Peter Camenzind
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