Elizabeth Hay Quotes
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The worst things were cowardly acts of betrayal. Betraying a friend and in the process betraying yourself. He knew all about that.
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But some feelings take a long time, they sort of grow behind your back. You turn around thirty years later and there they are.
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They were like an iceberg, it occurred to me, my father the seven-sights that was under the water and my mother the luminous portion riding the waves. But no, they were two icebergs: solitary phenomena, impressive, independent, known only to themselves. I felt their hidden seven-eighths inside me as a dark bulkiness whose outlines I was always trying to map.
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Hearts don't burst. They keep on expanding. There's no end to it.
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You stand next to the sea and you're in touch with all your longings and all your losses.
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The phrase that came to her mind was "the long and sudden of I." We go on and on through the long months of our lives until we hit a sudden moment that stuns us.
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And then he only had eyes for the pie. Watch any man, he could be ninety years old and drooling spit, but at the sight of homemade pie every last one of his wits will spring to attention.
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What we lose is any sense that life is alive, she thought. The days follow one after the other and everything passes us by. Then along comes someone who looks at us kindly, as if we were worth noticing, and life quickens.
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Who's to say we can't have many loves and many identities? we can hold more in our heads than we think.
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You see the same plain landscape day after day, and then one day, perhaps it's the play of light or the time of year, you find it beautiful and other landscapes at fault. So it must be with fashion. Ordinary judgement falls into abeyance and something else, some bewitchment, takes over. How else to explain the appeal of garments that in a few years look so ridiculous?
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A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone, and it’s marvelous for the stone and marvelous for the teacher.
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Forgiveness, she was thinking, was in some terrible, overeager way, a lack of curiosity. It was a big, powerful hose that washed everything away. She had, in effect, turned the hose on herself. "Of course I forgive you." As eager to reconcile as she has been in the schoolyard and in her first marriage too. Only to think that now she should not have been so hasty. Forgiveness was the premature end to the story. She had skipped to the last page instead of reading the book through.
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She would always be living her life backwards, she realized, trying to regain something perfect that she'd lost.
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The studio was connected by a picture window to master control, which was connected in the same way to the announce booth and the editing booth beyond that. She could see the length of the little station and into the hallway, too. And thus she was inducted into the visibility and invisibility of radio, the intimacy and the isolation.
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Where do they come from, these things that say more than we know and more than we intend?
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The present called for justice, not for nostalgia over another extravagant failure on the part of blind and incompetent white men.
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Movement always helps. A world of thoughts occurred to her whenever she rode a train, and a lesser world whenever she went for a walk.
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His face reminded her of an open book that's fallen into a puddle.
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She would always be careful around people like Parley Burns, tricky people who are thin skinned and punitive and intelligent and surprisingly honest.
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And when is it ever convincing, the belief others have in your abilities? You know perfectly well they can't see the mess inside you.
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You stay loyal to what increasingly disappoints you. It happens all the time.
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I'm dealing with nothing too. It goes on and on.
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You run over a part of yourself when you run over something that has such a place in your heart.
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The older you get, the closer your loves are to the surface. She was breathing rarefied air, the ether you come upon at high altitudes. I understood finally how long-held grievances and petty smallnesses might get burned off, and pure creativity and humour remain.