Gabrielle Roy Quotes
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One knows less about one's own destiny than about anything else on earth.
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Running anywhere, blindly, hating the echo of her footsteps in the silence of the empty streets, Florentine fled from her own fear, fled from herself.
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He Jean still felt surges of generosity, and gave in to them if they didn’t cramp his style. That was it. He could be kind if kindness caused him no problems.
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Rose-Anna was tugging at the edge of her apron with a tired, futile gesture she had never made in the past – the grandmother’s gesture.
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My great hope would be that Quebec would realize itself fully as a distinct part of Canada, and stay Canadian, bringing to Canada a part of its richness.
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Florentine had grown more or less immune to the charms of spring.
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The main engagement of the writer is towards truthfulness; therefore he must keep his mind and his judgement free.
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Why, this man seemed barely older than himself, Emmanuel thought. He gave off a sense of almost irresistible vigor. Quite simply, he had at last become a man...
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Azarius, for his part, had not made her voyage to the depths of pain to understand that death and birth, in that place, have almost the same tragic meaning.
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Why did she have to wake up this morning? Or ever! But especially this morning. Her stare took on a glint of panic. Then she thought: Oh! This is my wedding day!
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The more the heart is sated with joy, the more it becomes insatiable.
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Every life is a tragedy, but far more the writer's life, because the more he has to see, the more deeply he understands and feels about life, the less time he has to put it down.
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That was when she recognized love: this torture on seeing someone, the greater torture when he was out of sight, in short, a torture without end.
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It began to rain harder. The last snow was under attack by these heavy, wide-spaced drops. All that remained underfoot of months of frost and freezing was a light crust that crumbled as he walked. The sidewalk was soon completely washed by this slow, tenacious rain. Its smooth, shining surface reflected the midnight lights and tangles of naked branches.
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To make war, you had to be filled with love, with a vehement passion, exalted, intoxicated, otherwise the whole thing was inhuman and absurd.
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This is my wedding day! The day I marry Emmanuel! And the word 'wedding,' which she had always linked the happiness, now seemed austere, distressing, full of snares and revelations. She saw her mother, heavy and moving with difficulty. A vision of herself as a victim of the same deformity was vivid in her mind.
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They could see the rapids on their right. The swaying of the bus made her sick and weak, and her willpower was failing with her strength. She was afraid of falling into a torpor in which everything would become immaterial to her, and she tensed in an effort to seem gay and even attentive to Emmanuel.
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Peace has been as bad as war. Peace has killed as many people as war. Peace is as bad. Peace is as bad...
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Because you’d be running after your own unhappiness.
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On the windowpanes came rattling fistfuls of shot, and the snow whirled and sifted beneath ill-fitting doors, slid in the cracks of windowsills and searched in a frenzy for any refuge against the fury of the wind.
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Her shoulders sagging, her back hunched, her eyelids tired, Rose-Anna sewed for the feast, not daring even to sing for fear of frightening off her joy.
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For a long time he stood at the window looking at the shining rails. They had always fascinated him. Squinting a little he saw them stretch away to infinity, carrying him off to his rediscovered youth.
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The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it.
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it's a funny life. Either you don't make a red cent and you have all the time in the world, or else you get double the money and you don't have a moment to spend a penny of it.