Quotes from Ann-Marie MacDonald

When stories are not told, we risk losing our way.

Jetzt bleibt ihm nur noch er Tod, doch der lässt auf sich warten, weil Mahmoud ein Gewohnheitstier ist und sich daran ewöhnt hat, am Leben zu sein.

It's because a real and beautiful voice delicately rends the chest, discovered the heart, and holds it beating against a stainless edge until you long to be pierced utterly. For the voice is everything you do not remember. Everything you should not be able to live without and yet, tragically, do.

It's a sin for Lily to let Mercedes think it was Daddy who beat up Frances. But he has done it in the past. Surely truth can be borrowed across time without perishing. Shelf life, so to speak.

Byrn speaks and I understand him without effort, his words as clear as spring water. / Ask a favour of the plover, he says. Borrow her eyes. / Then I am flying through the air, and the flying is his song, and I am / the flying, and his words are golden ribbons scrolling about me, bearing / me along. I see the plover's wing and I am the plover. Suspended. / Above the moor. There is no longer any I, only All. / Simple. Vast. Unknown. / All to be forgot on waking, like dew on a spiderweb.

It was a moment of equal parts anxiety and awe, like the striking of a wide seam of gold. The prospector sinks to his knees--he's only been looking for coal. At a gush of oil he'd hoot, baptize himself and buy the drinks. But the sight of gold is different. He observes a moment's silence. Then he rises, eyes watering. How to get it properly out of the earth? How not to be robbed in the meantime?

Well, what was wrong with it? We don't know, says James. That's a stupid rotten answer. Life is sometimes rotten and stupid.

Corruption hangs in the air around a great talent. Such a gift is unstable by nature, apt to embarrass its handlers. About her there is the whiff of the entertainer. Like vaudeville nipping the heels of grand opera. The maestro smells all this on Kathleen and cools his blood to a temperature undetectable by wild animals.

It's not the cold that makes you sleep yourself to death in the Arctic, it's the smooth pallor of the landscape, and the desert has that same smooth pallor, though Arabic. It's the whiteness, the sameness of everything, that makes you fall asleep out of life, parched or frozen and so so comfortable when you finally let it roll over your mind, like a rolling-pin over dough.

Here is the place called Awake. On the other side of this line is the country of Asleep. And you see this shaded area in between? Don't linger there. It is No Man's Land.

The moon may drive men mad but it can calm a savage girl, for it is cool, precise, it is lucid.

Frances is a sealed letter. It doesn't matter where she's been or who's pawed her, no one gets to handle the contents no matter how grimy the envelope. And it's for sure no one's going to be able to steam her open.

Frances is a diamond, passed from filthy paw to paw but never diminished. The men who handle her can leave no mark because her worth is far above them. Hard, helpless, buried. You can hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes, she is waiting for a strong and fearless miner to go way down and rescue her up to the surface where she can shine for all she's worth.

Be strong enough to carry the burden of sin that goes with doing the right thing.

It had changed to hate. The hate that she prayed for Jesus to take away. But it was also part of what had kept her going so how could she do without it now? That kind of hate is a species of animated scrap metal. Rusting, corroding inside, leaching into the vital organs.

James could do all this because he had made a bargain with himself: he wouldn't try to get killed, nor would he try to survive. He could do all this because he felt terribly sorry for the men he rescued. They harbored the saddest and most foolish desire of all. The desire to go on living.

She is so beautiful. My Rose. Finer than sculpture, softer than sand. Rose, I'm kissing you now. Oh God, I have to kiss her. I will die if I don't kiss her, I know that now. It is a fact. I will die. It will kill me.

Then she kissed me in that way that makes me hate time.

I thought I would get calmer, surer, but each time we come close I feel almost sick at first. As though each time vibrates with the times before. I feel a terrible sorrow coming up my throat, I don't know why. And it can only be consoled against the length of her body. Lying down with her for the first time... all the pain I didn't know I had, till at her touch it disappeared like smoke. Is this what purgatory feels like? To burn painlessly? If so, why isn't it called heaven?

When will she discover that I am from a lesser race of immortals? But the high deities have always needed pixies to persuade them down to earth. When she no longer needs an intermediary, will she still love me?

There is love, there is music, there is no limit, there is work, there is the precious sense that this is the hour of grace when all things gather and distill to create the rest of my life. I don't believe in God, I believe in everything.

You always run into something no matter where you go. Turns out you're someplace after all.

Doch die Erinnerung spielt uns Streiche. Erinnern iat ein anderes Wort für Erfinden, und nichts ist unzuverlässiger.

They are all dead now.