Top 23 Quotes & Sayings by Margaret Laurence

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.

I am rampant with memory.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Follow your heart, and you perish.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.