Life would be grand if it weren’t for the people.
In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.
I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people felt that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra- I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it. But I didn’t go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.
To be a femme fatale you don’t have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb.
A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks.
Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after – like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word.
People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.
It seemed to me that winter was the time for love, not spring. In winter the habitable world was so much contracted; out of that little shut-in space we lived in, fantastic hopes might bloom. But spring revealed the ordinary geography of the place; the long, brown roads, the old cracked sidewalks underfoot, all the tree branches broken off in winter storms, that had to be cleared out of the yards. Spring revealed distances, exactly as they were.
She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood – that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements. It could be brimful of occupations which did not weary you to the bone.
But I hope you will – use your brains. Use your brains. Don’t be distracted. Once you make that mistake, of being – distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does.
When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified – no, frightened – by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs up between them, and they find themselves united in the most unexpected way. United in their humanity – that is the only way I can describe it. We parted almost as friends.
I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds – this was a comfort to me.
It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while.
Odd choices were simply easier for men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.
And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble – the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know.
The dream was in fact a lot like the Vancouver weather – a dismal sort of longing, a rainy dreamy sadness, a weight that shifted round the heart.
A million dollars in those days was a million dollars.
My mother had not let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at times appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present.
And the boat and the dock and the gravel on the shore, the trees sky-pointed or crouching, leaning out over the water, the complicated profile of surrounding islands and dim yet distinct mountains, seemed to exist in a natural confusion, more extravagant and yet more ordinary than anything I could dream or invent. Like a place that will go on existing whether you are there or not, and that in fact is still there.
Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?