Michael Winter Quotes
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We found letters at the house we bought from a sailor to his wife who lived in the house. He went down to the Caribbean on this trader vessel, bringing down salted fish. There would be handwritten letters, but also telegrams, saying which ports he was in. And he'd be gone for three months. That was just the way it is.
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If you look at footage of the Newfoundland Regiment, you see they are at rest and giddy and being silly with one another. Silliness is the antidote to trench warfare.
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The fantastic thing about the memorial to the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel is that it's one of the rare examples where they've preserved a battlefield more or less as it was. You can see all the trenches, where the British were, where the Germans lined up.
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Before Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, there was the same sort of talk of young men sacrificing their lives so that a country might grow - that somehow it had been a great nation-building success for Newfoundland.
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To me, the idea that any kind of disaster helps create a nation seems a ridiculous one. There was no family in the house on the land next to me, and there might have been.
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I've never in my life categorized a year of my life as good or bad. I just think I'm living a good life, warts and all.
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The greatness of being an artist is the kind of ridiculous guffaw you can have at one's own misery. 'That was miserable! Now how can I write about it?'
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A few years ago, I was trying to buy a piece of land next to a house I had in Newfoundland. I discovered that the plot had been owned by a family, and the son had gone off to World War I and been killed. It began to interest me: What would have happened on that land if the son had lived, had brought up his own family there?