I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian.

Mary Baker Eddy is said to have had a phone installed in her coffin just in case she happened to wake up. I've been told that's an urban myth. Somebody should check it out.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.

And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers

My parents were gardeners themselves, and perforce they used environmental techniques because it was during the war, and you didn't have the new sorts of chemicals.

I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.