Timothy Findley Quotes

I write against violence. I write against fascism. I write against one person dominating another.

... too much brooding, not enough doing.

Think of any great man or woman. How can you separate them from the years in which they lived? You can't. Their greatness lies in their response to that moment.

Everyone who’s born has come from the sea. Your mother’s womb is just a sea in small. And birds come of seas on eggs. Horses lie in the sea before they’re born. The placenta is the sea. Your blood is the sea continued in your veins. We are the ocean — walking on the land.

Complaints about reality are immature.

In the dark that followed - Lucy said; "where I was born, the trees were always in the sun. And I left that place because it was intolerant of rain. Now, we are here in a place where there are no trees and there is only rain. And I intend to leave this place - because it is intolerant of light. Somewhere - there must be somewhere where darkness and light are reconciled. So I am starting a rumour, here and now, of yet another world. I don't know when it will present itself - I don't know where it will be. But - as with all those other worlds now past when it is ready, I intend to go there.

They waited. The door did not open. The rain did not stop. The darkness made a tent and covered them completely.

What you people who weren't yet born can never know is what it meant to sleep in cities under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dogs that parked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even woke. It was the war that changed that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization - sleep was different everywhere.

The spaces between the perceiver and the thing perceived can [...] be closed with a shout of recognition.

People can only be found in what they do.

Elizabeth Hay has intelligence coming out of her fingertips - integrity, insight, and wonder in every paragraph of her writing.She connects. She stirs and provokes.

There are no beginnings, not even to stories. There are only places where you make an entrance into someone else's life and either stay or turn and go away.

All of this happened a long time ago. But not so long ago that everyone who played a part in it is dead. Some can still be met in dark old rooms with nurses in attendance.

Time is light, time is dark. You either dance, or you fall.

I still maintain that an ordinary human being has the right to be horrified by a mangled body seen on an afternoon walk.

And what you do is you go into where your anger is, if you're writing anger, you go into where your hatred is, if you're writing hatred. Your joy is, if you're writing joy. You find the source of the energy that draws hatred, anger, joy, etc., etc., etc. That's what you have to find. That's what you do as an actor and that's what you do as a writer. And you bring people to the page.

He said that in a way being loved is like being told you never have to die.

Nothing so completely verifies our perception of a thing as our killing of it.

Literature was intended to be dangerous. Art was meant to be dangerous. Ideas were nothing if they were not dangerous.

I doubt we will ever be forgiven. All I hope is – they'll remember we were human beings