30 Quotes by Margaret Laurence

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.

We think there is *one* planet called Earth, but there are thousands, even *millions*, like a snake shedding its skin every so often, but with all the old skins still bunched around it. You live inside the creature for quite a while, so it comes as a shock to find you're living now in one of the husked-off skins, and sometimes you can touch and know about the creature as it is now and sometimes you can't.

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

Privacy is a privilege not granted to the aged or the young. Sometimes very young children look at the old, and a look passes between them, conspiratorial, sly and knowing. It's because neither are human to the middling ones, those in their prime, as they say, like beef.

Because they don't know [the anger is] there inside them. [...] They think they are sweet reasonableness, and it's you that's in the wrong, just by being, and not being like them, or looking like them, or wanting their kind of life.

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.

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

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

They remain shadows. Two sepia shadows on an old snapshot, two barely moving shadows in my head, shadows whose fewremaining words and acts I have invented. Perhaps I only want their forgiveness for having forgotten them. I remember their deaths, but not their lives. Yet they’re inside me, flowing unknown in my blood and moving unrecognized in my skull.