Top 26 Quotes & Sayings by Lori Lansens

I have had, like most women, a lifelong preoccupation with my weight. My first published short story was a love story between an elderly man and a very young morbidity obese woman.

I was in the emergency room twice with heart palpitations and panic attacks. As one of my actor friends pointed out: your body doesn't know that you're making art. You think about struggle and challenge and you imagine yourself weighing 302 pounds and being restricted and in despair. Your body doesn't know that that's not the case.

What is it about sadness that can be so fulfilling?

Art isn't a product. It's an experience

The city, no matter how small, is corrupt and unrepentant, while the sun shines brighter in the country, making people more wholesome.

If you don't like something about yourself, change it. If you're OK with it, you gotta own it. There's nothing in between.

When you stand outside, you look around and find that the people you're with live on the fringes.

When we talk about God, I think what most of us mean is some greater thing, some higher power that can help us access our own strength or give us strength.

We're seeing a decline in religion in North America but, I hope, a rise in individual spirituality. Whatever that means to people.

Aunt Lovey used to tell me that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed a writer's voice. 'Read,' she'd say, 'and if you have a writer's voice, one day it will shout out, 'I can do that too!

I feel, holding books, accommodating their weight and breathing their dust, an abiding love. I trust them, in a way that I can't trust my computer, though I couldn't do without it. Books are matter. My books matter. What would I have done through these years without the library and all its lovely books?

Write,' she said, 'as if you'll never be read. That way you'll be sure to tell the truth.

the only thing left to do is love

When I grew up, all of our news, weather, and sports came from America. The people where I grew up rooted for American teams as opposed to Canadian teams.

Now that I live in Southern California, my current world certainly speaks to me, and I sense that my next book will have a more American and southerly setting. But that's certainly not to say I won't be back to Leaford.

The world's waistlines are expanding, but it's an epidemic of a larger issue in terms of our bounty having become our burden.

Because I live in California now, I find my musings really being centered in this world.

How cruel it must be for a man to live past his soul.

Winning the lottery is winning the lottery. It's highly unlikely and very unusual.

I have never looked into my sister's eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to the beguiling moon. I’ve never used an airplane bathroom. Or worn a hat. Or been kissed like that. I’ve never driven a car. Or slept through the night. Never a private talk. Or a solo walk. I’ve never climbed a tree. Or faded into a crowd. So many things I’ve never done, but oh, how I’ve been loved. And, if such things were to be, I’d live a thousand lives as me, to be loved so exponentially.

Evidence tells that black and Latina woman are more accepting of curves, and that's a good thing.

I'm not alone in having obese people in my circle and in my family. I have loved morbidly obese people, and I don't approach obesity with revulsion or judgment but with empathy and compassion.

The drugstore is a wonderful place to see all manner of ailments.

The strangest thing about strange things is that they're only strange when you hear about them or think about them later, but never when you're living them.

If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.

I hum some secret place into being, thinking of this other me, the one that only I can see, a girl called She, who is not We, a girl who I will never be.