­Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.

I am not a saint or a cripple, I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward.

The central symbol for Canada-and this based on numerous instances of its occurrence in both English and French Canadian literature-is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.