Margaret Laurence Quotes

What goes on inside isn't ever the same as what goes on outside.

Well, you're young. You know a lot you won't know later on.

In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.

Holidays are enticing only for the first week or so. After that, it is no longer such a novelty to rise late and have little to do.

If I hadn't had my children, I wouldn't have written more and better, I would have written less and worse.

Why doesn't Prin go and get her own goddamn blistering bloody shitty jelly doughnuts?

It is my feeling that as we grow older we should become not less radical but more so. I do not, of course, mean this in any political-party sense, but rather in a willingness to struggle for those things in which we passionately believe. Social activism and the struggle for social justice are often thought of as the natural activities of the young but not of the middle-aged or the elderly. In fact, I don't think this was ever true.

Will we ever reach a point when it is no longer necessary to say Them and Us? I believe we must reach that point, or perish.

Women, as well as men, in all ages and in all places, have danced on the earth, danced the life dance, danced joy, danced grief, danced despair, and danced hope. Literally and metaphorically, by their very lives.

When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.

I've never been able to force a novel. I always had the sense something being given to me. You can't sit around and wait until inspiration strikes, but neither can you force into being something that isn't there.

Know that although in the eternal scheme of things you are small, you are also unique and irreplaceable, as are all your fellow humans everywhere in the world.

As we grow older we should become not less radical but more so.

Follow your heart, and you perish.

The dead don't bear a grudge nor seek a blessing. The dead don't rest uneasy. Only the living.

Bless me or not, Lord, just as You please, for I'll not beg.

Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear.

Privacy is a privilege not granted to the aged or the young.

I used to think there would be a blinding flash of light someday, and then I would be wise and calm and would know how to cope with everything and my kids would rise up and call me blessed. Now I see that whatever I'm like, I'm pretty well stuck with it for life. Hell of a revelation that turned out to be.

I am rampant with memory.

Animals are less alone with roaring than we are with all these words.

I can't change what's happened to me in my life, or make what's not occurred take place. But I can't say I like it, or accept it, or believe it's for the best. I don't and never shall, not even if I'm damned for it.