The MacKinnons were always new, always almost just like everyone else. Always next door to normal. It was like growing up in the witness protection program without changing your name.
Non sa bene quanti altri ci siano stati, però sa, grazie a Maureen, che uno è finito nel water di Kingston. Casa loro era nuova e perciò, le ha raccontato, non infestata dai fantasmi. Anche se chi può...
Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable. Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees
It's important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.
Good women discuss these things the way epidemiologists identify and track disease without alarming the public. This is woman’s work. Men are unfitted for it by nature and should be protected from it...
Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things. Garbage cans at the ends of alleyways look like they've been u...
Doch die Erinnerung spielt uns Streiche. Erinnern iat ein anderes Wort für Erfinden, und nichts ist unzuverlässiger.
By fall, they can read. It happened by osmosis, the way it ought to: after they have spent several months on Daddy's lap, following his spoken words with their eyes and pretending to read, their comes...
The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear we should not judge. We should just say, poor Camille, she turned into a bitch the way most people w...
She rejoins the crowd and watches with her friends, but she feels like an emptied glass - that crestfallen feeling of walking out from a movie theatre in the middle of the day, out from the intimate m...
She ran right into his arms and he swung heraround like a little kid, laughing, and then they hugged. He thought his heart wouldkill him, he'd had no clue what it was capable of.
I thought I would get calmer, surer, but each time we come close I feel almost sick at first. As though each time vibrates with the times before. I feel a terrible sorrow coming up my throat, I don't...
Corruption hangs in the air around a great talent. Such a gift is unstable by nature, apt to embarrass its handlers. About her there is the whiff of the entertainer. Like vaudeville nipping the heels...
All memories soften with age, and the good ones are also the most perishable (...) conjured up till they faded to nothing. Like cave paintings by candlelight, she could only glimpse them now in the da...
Adelaide believes that all children should have enough grown-ups around who love them so that one can tell them to fight, one can tell them not to, and one can tell them not to worry so much.
Who's the Devil?Frances crouches down as if she were talking to Trixie. That's something I'll never tell you, Lily, no matter how old you get to be, because the Devil is shy. It makes him angry when s...
It’s a sin for Lily to let Mercedes think it was Daddy who beat up Frances. But he has done it in the past. Surely truth can be borrowed across time without perishing. Shelf life, so to speak.
Frances is a diamond, passed from filthy paw to paw but never diminished. The men who handle her can leave no mark because her worth is far above them. (page 361)
Do you think there's such a thing as a ghost who masquerades as a person? Do you believe that there are people whose bodies are still alive here on earth but whose souls are already in hell?
It's not the cold that makes you sleep yourself to death in the Arctic, it's the smooth pallor of the landscape, and the desert has that same smooth pallor, though Arabic. It's the whiteness, the same...