Margaret Laurence quotes:

In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.

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

Holidays are enticing only for the first week or so. After that, it is no longer such a novelty to rise late and have little to do.

Know that although in the eternal scheme of things you are small, you are also unique and irreplaceable, as are all your fellow humans everywhere in the world.

Even if heaven were real, and measured as Revelation says, so many cubits this wayand that, how gimcrack a place it would be, crammed with its pavements of gold, its gates of pearl and topaz, like a gigantic chunkof costume jewelry.

Animals are less alone with roaring than we are with all these words.

Follow your heart, and you perish.

Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear.

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

Why doesn't Prin go and get her own goddamn blistering bloody shitty jelly doughnuts?

Why doesn't Prin go and get her own goddamn blistering bloody shitty jelly doughnuts?"

How it irks me to have to take her hand, allow her to pull my dress over my head, undo my corsets and strip them off my, and have her see my blue veined swollen flesh and the hairy triangle that still proclaims with lunatic insistence a non-existent womanhood.

As we grow older we should become not less radical but more so.

I am rampant with memory.

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.

I used to think there would be a blinding flash of light someday, and then I would be wise and calm and would know how to cope with everything and my kids would rise up and call me blessed. Now I see that whatever I'm like, I'm pretty well stuck with it for life. Hell of a revelation that turned out to be.

If I hadn't had my children, I wouldn't have written more and better, I would have written less and worse.

It is my feeling that as we grow older we should become not less radical but more so. I do not, of course, mean this in any political-party sense, but rather in a willingness to struggle for those things in which we passionately believe. Social activism and the struggle for social justice are often thought of as the natural activities of the young but not of the middle-aged or the elderly. In fact, I don't think this was ever true.

I've never been able to force a novel. I always had the sense something being given to me. You can't sit around and wait until inspiration strikes, but neither can you force into being something that isn't there.

The dead don't bear a grudge nor seek a blessing. The dead don't rest uneasy. Only the living.

Well, you're young. You know a lot you won't know later on.

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

Will we ever reach a point when it is no longer necessary to say Them and Us? I believe we must reach that point, or perish.

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.

When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.