“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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“The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
“Poverty can’t rob me of those memories. I have lived in an ideal world that was not deceitful, a world which seems to me, when I recall it, beyond the human sphere, bathed in diviner light.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“One morning, they discovered that they’d dreamed of the same field, the same clouds, the same house in the distance – wooden with a red-brick chimney. They had dreamed of the same squirrels and rabbits. They had drunk from the same clear stream. There was only one difference: when Nira, in her dream, looked into the water, she saw Majnoun’s face reflected back at her, while Majnoun, in his, saw Nira’s face where his should have been. The fact of this shared dream was so moving to Nira that, ever after, she refused to allow anyone – even Miguel – to refer to Majnoun as ‘her’ dog.”
― André Alexis, quote from Fifteen Dogs
“Isn’t killing killers”—he finger-quotes the word—“a little ironic?” The”
― K.E. Ganshert, quote from The Gifting
“After the storm the city lies becalmed. It is a sunny morning, still and cold. Branches litter the streets like broken limbs. People clear away the wreckage. They swarm around like ants whose anthill has been scuffed; how doggedly they rebuild their lives.”
― Deborah Moggach, quote from Tulip Fever
Bambi
Embrace The Darkness
Parade's End
Bad Science
Sunrise
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