18 Quotes by Marian Engel

There is a difference between art and life and that difference is readability.

Remember that it is not enough to have everything around you beautiful, remember that there must also be change and flux, because it is through change that we pretend that we can make decisions, and keep our pride, and go on pretending that both change and choice exist.

There’s a kind of virgin one only becomes with difficulty.

Happiness is a fragile thing, and alcohol, as I know from the house I grew up in, is dangerous to it.

All intellectual missionaries tend to lechery.

Bear,” she cried. “I love you. Pull my head off.

She always attempted to be orderly, to catalogue her thoughts and feelings, so that when the awful, anarchic inner voice caught her out, her mind was stocked with efficacious replies. “What am I doing here?” could be answered with lists. She had another stock of replies to “Who the hell do you think you are, attempting to be alive?” She justified herself by saying that she was of service, that she ordered fragments of other lives.

She makes her little house to shine, she thought.

The Canadian tradition was, she had found, on the whole genteel. Any evidence that an ancestor had performed any acts other than working and praying was usually destroyed. Families handily became respectable in retrospect but it was... hell on history.