“As for the myths, take anyone's life and deny that most of it is deliberate self-delusion - an aggrandizement - a mixture of lies and truth, of what was wanted and what was had, producing the necessary justification for having been granted life in the first place. I was struck like a match, Lily wrote. I had no option but to burn.
You can put a period after that. Lily did. It was the story of her life.”
― Timothy Findley, quote from The Piano Man's Daughter
“Ede had been pregnant not quite the full term: eight months, two weeks, four days. She had lapsed into an extended silence - partly because she was still in mourning - still enraged and afraid of speech. And partly, too, because the child itself had taken up dreaming in her belly - dreaming and, Ede was certain, singing. Not singing songs a person knew, of course. Nothing Ede could recognize. But songs for certain. Music - with a tune to it. Evocative. A song about self. A song about place. As if a bird had sung it, sitting in a tree at the edge of a field. Or high in the air above a field. A hovering song. Of recognition.”
― Timothy Findley, quote from The Piano Man's Daughter
“I can't work in a house where there's saints. The minute there's saints, the devil sends messengers”
― Timothy Findley, quote from The Piano Man's Daughter
“I tell you Charlie, I was there waiting in that field. waiting for Ede and Tom to find me. You don't think two people come together for nothing, do you? They were together because I was waiting to be found..."
Then she looked straight into my face and said to me: "You know it, too, Charlie. All that time you waited for me to find you. What if I hadn't? What if I'd said: I won't?"
She turned, and clinging to my arm, she surveyed the fields of snow the stretched away to the confining wall.”
― Timothy Findley, quote from The Piano Man's Daughter
“Frederick?
Had she really spoken? Certainly she'd tried, but her voice had failed to materialize and all she heard was the sound of her nightgown ripping as Frederick pulled it over her head and threw it aside.
He was kneeling now between her ankles, pushing at her, forcing her knees apart and then her arms until she was entirely splayed on the bed beneath him.
Nothing was said. Not a word.
Ede felt his hand between her legs, forcing the way for the rest of him. Stop, she wanted to tell him. Stop. I don't understand what you're doing. But nothing - still nothing was said.
He seemed to be raging inside her, moving his hips in a circular fashion, all the weight of his upper body help above her, resting on his arms, his hands pushing down into the mattress.
Stop! But he didn't.
Don't! But he did.
Nothing. Not one word.
The only sound he made was a choking noise in his throat at the end, as tough he might be going to strangle. But when he rolled away from her onto his back, she felt the shudder of his first free breath and she heard him sigh. It was over. Tonight. It was done.
Ede could not bare the thought of seeing him, or of being seen. Still without speaking, she rose from the bed and through the dark, found her way to the bathroom. She had brought the torn nightgown wit her, but when she turned on the light and saw it, she threw it down in the corner. Ruined. Spoiled. Everything.
When at last, she returned to the bed, Fredrick was sound asleep beneath the covers - and nothing - nothing - nothing was said.”
― Timothy Findley, quote from The Piano Man's Daughter
“With Tom, there had never been a door to close, only the grass to lie on, never a bed; no walls, no ceiling to shut them in - or others out. Only the moon to see them, only the moon, some stars and whatever it was that had flown up out of the field when Ede had cried 'don't' in the final seconds of their embrace. Don't - meaning don't withdraw.”
― Timothy Findley, quote from The Piano Man's Daughter
Timothy Findley
Born place: in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Born date October 30, 1930
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“Some things are better left the way they are”
― Cecelia Ahern, quote from The Marble Collector
“I close my eyes and think of the photograph Culler showed me. I see it in my head perfectly. He'll be there, at that school. Another piece of my father. And then another. Six pieces. I will find them all, put them together. I'll find him.
And then I'll let him go.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from Fall for Anything
“People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time.”
― Milan Kundera, quote from The Festival of Insignificance
“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”
― Voltaire, quote from Candide: or, Optimism
“Her eyes were closed to the sunlight flickering past the window, her ears plugged with tiny white buds, slender fingers tapping a steady moderato beat at odds with the easy sway in her shoulders. I couldn't hear the music, but as I watched, her body coiled around a deep breath, and the rhythm accelerated through the flat of her hand, and then her hips rocked to four powerful chords, and her head dropped loose on her shoulders, and she squeezed her knees together and drew in her feet, her calf muscles tautening and her ankle bones turning and then tendons in the back of her hand thumping time and the cords of her neck pulling the skin tight over her collarbones as her body snaked through what I heard in my head as Hugh Burns's guitar solo in "Baker Street" clear as day. And though confined to her seat, she danced unselfconsciously and without restraint, and every small movement in every small part of her—the life in her—was the most beautiful thing I thought I'd ever seen. I wanted to cup her gently in my hands and carry her home and keep her forever but, mindful of the probability that she might have other ideas, instead I closed my eyes and turned up the music in my head and, in spirit if not quite in body, danced with her instead.”
― Graeme Cameron, quote from Normal
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