32 Quotes by Margo Lanagan

A heart may desire a thing powerfully indeed, but that heart's desire might be what a person least needs, for her health, for her continuing happiness.

You may never be entirely happy; few people are. You may never achieve your heart's desire in this world, for people seldom do. Sit be enough deathbeds, Branza, and you will hear your fill of stories of missed chances, and wrong turnings, and spurned opportunities for love.

I may not be happy," she said, "but I will be.

Seals do not sit about and tell, the way people do, and their lives are not eventful in the way people's are, lines of story combed again and again, in the hope that they will yield more sense with every stroke.

While you wait for a grander plan to emerge in your head, a thousand small choices make up your life, none of them honorable.

How different other families were, the shape of them, the things they presumed, the children that grew up in them.

It was one thing not to want a husband, I realized; it was quite another not to need one for the roof over your head, for your meat and bread, for the shoes on your feet and the coat on your back.

Why must we climb away to the seal-less parts of the world?

But Urdda stood firm. 'Where do you come from, sir?''I come' - the littlee-man stalked towards her in a way that might have been menacing, had he been full-sized - 'from Smelly-bumhole Land. You may call me Mister Odiferous. Up through the arse of the world I come here, and when I'm finished I will squeeze myself back out it.