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
“If you live in your sense, slowly, with attention, if you use your eyes and your fingertips and your taste buds, then romance is something you’ll never need a greeting card to make you remember.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients
“I busted him and he busted me. That's fair ain't it?
No, I ain't forgettin about jail. You think because he arrested me that thows it off again I reckon? I don't. It's his job. It's what he gets paid for. To arrest people that break the law. And I didn't jest break the law, I made a livin at it. More money in three hours than any workin man makes in a week. Why is that? Because it's harder work? No, because a man who makes a livin doin somethin that has to get him in jail sooner or later has to be paid for the jail, has to be paid in advance not jest for his time breakin the law but for the time he has to build when he gets caught at it. So I been paid. Gifford's been paid. Nobody owes nobody. If it wadn't for Gifford, the law, I wouldn't of had the job I had blockadin and if it wadn't for me blockadin, Gifford wouldn't of had his job arrestin blockaders. Now who owes who?”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from The Orchard Keeper
“Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from Angels and Insects
“Writing feels safer somehow. I can catch myself before I say the wrong thing.”
― Hillary Frank, quote from I Can't Tell You
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