41 quotes
The thick, sugary covering of the snow.
Moo (1995)
Failure was startling, really. So startling that I hardly noticed it at all.
A Year at the Races (2004)
The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
A Thousand Acres (1991)
Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who’ve really faced the facts.
A Thousand Acres (1991)
She had gone off from her husband to live by herself with the priests, had she not? Does a man, seeing a trinket lying before him in the grass, fail to pick it up?
The Greenlanders (1988)
Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.
A Thousand Acres (1991)
Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had but actually you never know just by remembering how many there were to have faced.
A Thousand Acres (1991)
I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
A Thousand Acres (1991)
It is neither floating nor springing. It is power without labor, thrust without force, the very opposite of any sort of aggression, the particular physics of his anatomy, the demonstration and the effect of his personality.
A Year at the Races (2004)
And then he saw what he was, an old man, ready to die, pressed against the Greenland earth, as small as an ash berry on the face of a mountain, and he did the only thing that men can do when they know themselves, which was to weep and weep and weep.
The Greenlanders (1988)
We’re not going to be sad. We’re going to be angry until we die. It’s the only hope.
A Thousand Acres (1991)
I will never see her, hard as I try to look past love. My eyes will always cast a light over her, and I will always think that this love, mine for her, is a dear thing. But it is as common as sand, as common as flesh.
The Age of Grief (1987)
I always feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don’t, sort of puffs you up.
A Thousand Acres (1991)
Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse.
A Year at the Races (2004)
Some days they would talk all morning about exactly how warm Heaven might be. It could not be warm enough so that souls went naked, or could it? If souls went naked, then why all the weaving, and if there was no weaving then how did souls occupy themselves?
The Greenlanders (1988)
This is my thought, that for every soul, something must come to pass, and for everything that does come to pass, every soul can imagine many things that might have come to pass, all of them less evil than what actually fell out. Folk must have something to think on, or they would be unable to hope for Heaven or remember Paradise.
The Greenlanders (1988)
Dana seemed to me to be sort of like a hot-air balloon. The more weight we could hang on her, in terms of children, houses, belongings, foodstuffs, office equipment, and debts, the harder it would be for her to gain altitude.
The Age of Grief (1987)
The novel integrates several forms of human intelligence — verbal intelligence (for the style), psychological intelligence (for the characters), logical intelligence (for the plot), spatial intelligence (for the symbolic and metaphorical content as well as the setting), and even musical intelligence (for pacing and rhythm).
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2006)
Margret saw that this is how it is that folk are made to desire what they know they should not have, they are made to wait for it, so that when it comes, no matter how dark and full of sin and repellent it is, they are glad enough to welcome it.
The Greenlanders (1988)
Still others reflected on how quickly the food could be snatched from a man's table, or the child from a woman's breast, or the wife from a man's bedcloset, that no strength of grasp could hold these goods in place. And others remarked to themselves how sweet these goods were, in spite of that, and saw that pleasure lost in every moment is pleasure lost forever.
The Greenlanders (1988)