Quotes from Ann-Marie MacDonald

No one knows it yet, but Cape Breton is a dress rehearsal for the Great Depression.

for my wife," she didn't raise an eyebrow but went immediately to her cupboards and pointed out ingredients. Benny noted it all on brown butcher paper as Mrs Mahmoud mimed the whole process, including the imprinting of a cross on the

It's a self-portrait and the artist is in love.

July I The British plan is this: a million shells to cut the Boche wire. Shoulder your seventy-pound pack as usual. Go over the top. Walk towards the German lines, they'll all be dead by now. Keep walking til you hit Berlin. In four and a half hours, fifty thousand Britons and Canadians are shot. That afternoon, the British plan is revised: do everything as before. But this time, run. Abe is killed walking. Rudy is killed running.

Mercedes] learns a valuable lesson: if you think you are good, just try doing good. You'll soon find out how inadequate your little drop of goodness is.

Somewhere inside his head he's still all there, but moved into a cramped rear apartment overlooking the old brain.

One heck of a middle C today. Felt like I was gorging on a chocolate eclair. Kaiser none too pleased - after all, I'm a soprano. Sopranos don't sing in chocolate.

Good women discuss these things the way epidemiologists identify and track disease without alarming the public. This is woman's work. Men are unfitted for it by nature and should be protected from it the same way women shouldn't have to go down the mines. Men are so innocent.

I am here as a speck, but I don't feel scared or about to be blown away, I feel like all New York is a warm embrace just waiting to enfold me.

The more I drink, the more I remember all the things we've never done. I was a ghost until I touched you. Never swallowed mortal food until I tasted you, never understood the spoken word until I found your tongue. I've been a sleep-walker, sad somnambula, hands outstretched to strike the solid thing that could awaken me to life at last. I have only ever stood here under this lamp, against your body, I've missed you all my life.

Tues. April 16 - Coney Island! Ate only pink things. Threw up. It was worth it.

Sat - sex is good for the voice. Why don't they teach you that in school?

It's a long silence but far from empty.

She follows the putrid cloud downstairs and

James discovered that there is nothing so congenial to lucid thought as a clear view of the sea. It aired his mind, tuned his nerves and scoured his soul. He determined always to live in sight of it.

He was neither frightened nor skeptical, but felt himself drawn in with an involuntary faith--which is what faith is--

He felt, before he learned anything about where she came from, that the photograph had made them one.

How unhappy are they who have a gift that's left to germinate in darkness. The pale plant will sink invisible roots and live whitely off their blood.

He loved her way: acting casual, working like a Trojan, singing like an angel. Not angelically. The voice of an angel. Winged, lethal, close to the sun.

Freedom consists of being insulated from the envy and ignorance of the unimportant people who temporarily surround her.

The MacKinnons were always new, always almost just like everyone else. Always next door to normal. It was like growing up in the witness protection program without changing your name.

People who can cope take responsibility for things. Which means they need to have had them coming. The alternative is too terrifying: that bad things can just happen to them. It will be you the icicle falls on from twenty storeys up. You waiting for the bus when a motorist has a stroke and mounts the curb. To have been available to disaster once means to be permanently without a roof. Unless it was somehow your fault.

Ignore them. Don't give them the opportunity to snub you. Carry yourself like you own the place.

Fresh sorrows reactivate old ones. We go to the same well to grieve, and it's fuller every time.