35 Quotes by Timothy Findley

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

Your blood is the sea continued in your veins. We are the ocean – walking on the land.

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

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

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.

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...

I knew that most of what is frightening and much of what is evil happens by the light of day. No need for darkness. Caesar, after all, had been murdered in the presence of a hundred people and more – some time between high noon and five o’clock. Right in these waters off the coast of Maine the most terrifying sharks are the ones we see in the radiance of fear. The real ones – darkened below us – do no harm until they rise towards the light. If only, I began to wish, it would get dark.

So far, you have read of the deaths of 557,017 people – one of whom was killed by a streetcar, one of whom died of bronchitis and one of whom died in a barn with her rabbits.