Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We don't choose the books we write; they choose us.
All the books I've read, I've read at the right moment.
There was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine.
It's raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.
Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams.
Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?
If, along the way, something is gained, then something will also be lost.
Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!
Her faith in a loving and forgiving God is strong, but she worships laughter.
Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.
I spent 18 years in a small Mennonite town in the middle of the Canadian prairies.
I love road trips. You get into this Zen rhythm; throw sense of time out the window.
David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic. . . .
But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief.
In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.
She was becoming sad. There is no joy involved in following others' expectations of yourself
There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.
If you have to end up in the hospital, try to focus all your pain in your heart rather than your head.
I don't even know what 'successful' means. We're all failures. Look at the world. We're all complicit.
'Irma Voth' is my sixth book, but it's only the third time I've featured Mennonite settings and characters.
You don't need a religious background to strive for something good, for genuine compassion and love for others.
At one point in my life, I wanted to do a master's degree in Irish literature, but I ended up getting pregnant instead.
I learned another thing, which is that just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.
...and I put on "All My Love" and watched the sun rise yet again and thought thank you Robert Plant for all your love but do you have anymore?
Conversing with children is a fine art.... An art form that demands large amounts of both honesty and misdirection. Or maybe discretion is a better word.
Like every Canadian, I have been taught that one of the most important functions of art is to supply and elaborate the myths and narratives of nationhood.
It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.
I wondered if it was possible to donate my body to science before I was actually dead. I wondered if a disease were to be named after me what the symptoms would be.
It’s hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is God’s will. It’s hard to know what to do with your emptiness when you’re not supposed to have emptiness.
When a person becomes a legend, the very thing that makes them human and knowable is killed off, so it's like being killed over and over and over again, for all eternity.
The theme of sisters - of missing sisters, of needing sisters, the special love that sisters share or the antagonism sisters share - is something that is very close to me.
But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.
There are people who are just suicidal, regardless. They are built to self-destruct. It seems, in my family, like a virus that's resistant to any kind of help or care or medication.
A few weeks ago my uncle came over to borrow my dad's socket set and when he asked my dad how he was my dad said oh unexceptional. Living quietly with my disappointments. And how are you
The British are actually a lot more appreciative of the comic. In Canada, if you're perceived as a comic writer, there's a real snobbery, and you can't be serious. You're not a big hitter.
'Cue for Treason,' by Geoffrey Trease, radicalized my young girl brain and made me want to be a gender-bending, sonnet-writing anarchist. It really made something roar to life inside of me.
A depressed person is often a person who will push others away. If you are pushed away and pushed away and pushed away, you have to have an enormous amount of inner resources to keep going back.
The writing life is one long, never-ending search for narrative. Well, it's not even a conscious searching. It happens even while you're busy buying groceries and when you're fast asleep. It's a curse.
My father died beside trees on iron rails... He had 77 dollars on him at the time, and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this, 'You still have to eat.'
I stare out the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one's imagination and one's goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving.
I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.
I would never want to deny my Mennonite background and culture; I'll always feel like and be identified as a Mennonite and therefore possess that little extra authority on our beliefs. I also see myself as a Canadian writer.
After that we tried thirty-nine times to stand together on the tube until we finally did. It was fun. I liked the falling part, and holding hangs. Relationships were so easy when all you had to work on was standing up together.
A lot of times, people think that it doesn't make sense for people to be depressed when they have everything, a loving husband, a successful career, fame and fortune. I wanted to make this point that profound despair can strike anybody.
With my father and sister being very depressed for most of their lives, it was incumbent on me to try to make them laugh, in this ridiculous way. They were the wittiest people I knew, but to get a smile from them was like winning the lottery.
Canada has, at times, represented itself as a country in a valiant struggle against powerful and menacing agents that are indifferent to its special practices and sensibilities - most especially American culture. It's the old, outdated garrison mentality.
I have a problem with beginnings... and endings... and middles. But I don't know what else I would do. I find it very, very difficult to write. It takes everything; it's physically and mentally and emotionally exhausting for me. And my neighbours. And my dog.
It bothered me in a kind of Charles Manson way to have a brown smear of blood on my wall but I also liked it because every time I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment, not bleeding from my face. And those are powerful words of hope, really.
A person might see that I've blurbed a certain book and decide they want nothing to do with it! Like, 'If that reprobate Toews likes it, forget it!' So, it's a crapshoot. But it feels good to be able to praise a book that I love or that has been written by a new writer.
Even a Menno sheltered from the world knows not to stick her tongue into the mouth of a boy who owns an Air Supply record. You might stick your tongue into the mouth of a boy who owned some Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but you would not date him on a regular basis, or openly.