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?
He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee.
WHEN I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.
Roly Grain, his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.
There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It’s true. Was true. You will want to have children, though.
I actually had a long career as a flirt ahead of me. It’s quite a natural behaviour, once the loss of love makes you give up your ideas of marriage.
Poverty in girls is not attractive unless combined with sweet sluttishness, stupidity.
This is the day of wonders. The land is covered with trees like a head with hair and behind the ship the sun rises tipping the top trees with light. The sky is clear and shining as a china plate and the water playfully ruffled with wind. Every wisp of fog is gone and the air is full of the resinous smell of the trees. Seabirds are flashing above the sails golden like creatures from Heaven, but the sailors raise a few shots to keep them from the rigging.
Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. Both.
There ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for – but never did get to see.