Ann-Marie MacDonald · 848 pages
Rating: (11.5K votes)
“There are some stories you can't hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That's one reliable way of understanding time.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, quote from The Way the Crow Flies
“Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, quote from The Way the Crow Flies
“Writing. Opening a vein in your wrist with a spoon.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, quote from The Way the Crow Flies
“As time went by, it mattered less and less that in 1969 a rocket went from Florida to the moon and men walked there. Good men. People's dads. Those were only events, scattered in time. Draw them close, rub them between thumb and finger till they look like larvae, soften like silk, distend to knot, to weave. It takes a village to kill a child.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, quote from The Way the Crow Flies
“She rejoins the crowd and watches with her friends, but she feels like an emptied glass - that crestfallen feeling of walking out from a movie theatre in the middle of the day, out from the intimate matinée darkness and the smell of popcorn, which is the smell of heightened colour and sound and story, into the borderless bright of day. Bereft.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, quote from The Way the Crow Flies
“Tell the story, gather the events, repeat them. Pattern is a matter of upkeep. Otherwise the weave relaxes back to threads picked up by birds to make their nests. Repeat, or the story will fall and all the king's horses and all the king's men. . . . Repeat, and cradle the pieces carefully, or events will scatter like marbles on a wooden floor.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, quote from The Way the Crow Flies
“Perhaps God dropped them on their heads before they were born.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, quote from The Way the Crow Flies
“Between a mother’s eyes and her son’s face, there is not air. There is something invisible and invincible. Even though—or because—he will go out into the world, she will never lose her passion to protect him.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, quote from The Way the Crow Flies
“You always run into something no matter where you go. Turns out you're someplace after all.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, quote from The Way the Crow Flies
Ann-Marie MacDonald
Born place: in Baden-Baden, Germany
Born date October 29, 1958
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“See how she leans her cheek upon her hand.
O, that I were a glove upon that hand
That I might touch that cheek!”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Romeo and Juliet
“Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Jane Eyre
“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”
― William Golding, quote from Lord of the Flies
“It was the pure Language of the World. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time. What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing. He was more certain of it than of anything in the world. He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way had never learned the universal language. Because, when you know that language, it's easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it's in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one's dreams would have no meaning.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from The Alchemist
“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Crime and Punishment
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