Ann-Marie MacDonald > Quotes

“Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall On Your Knees

“There are some stories you can't hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That's one reliable way of understanding time.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“She's no lady. Her songs are all unbelievably unhappy or lewd. It's called Blues. She sings about sore feet, sexual relations, baked goods, killing your lover, being broke, men called Daddy, women who dress like men, working, praying for rain. Jail and trains. Whiskey and morphine. She tells stories between verses and everyone in the place shouts out how true it all is.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“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 up all night talking with each other. Doorways with peeling paint look like the wise lines around an old feller's eyes. I stop and stare but can't stay because men always think I'm selling something. Or worse, giving something away. I wish I could be invisible. Or at least I wish I didn't look like someone they want to look at. They stop being part of the picture, they get up from their chess game and come out of the frame at me, blocking my view.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“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?”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“They are so young, they forget that the world is not as in love with them as they are.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“Under a smoky streetlamp I stood face to face with my beloved and pricked my fingers against the diamond studs of her immaculate shirt front. Being tall, she slipped her hands naturally about my hips and pulled me close. And being bold, I put my mouth on hers and this time went inside and told her all the things I’d been longing to. Dark and sweet, the elixir of love is in her mouth. The more I drink, the more I remember all the things we’ve never done. I was a ghost until I touched you. Never swallowed mortal food until I tasted you, never understood the spoken word until I found your tongue. I’ve been a sleep-walker, sad somnambula, hands outstretched to strike the solid thing that could awaken me to life at last. I have only ever stood here under this lamp, against your body, I’ve missed you all my life.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“I am burning. I have to live, I have to sing, I want to transform myself into a thousand different characters and carry their life with me onto the stage where it's so bright and so dark at the same time, just knowing there are three thousand people out there longing to be swept away by the passion that's about to flood out from scarlet curtains, to this I consecrate my body and my soul, I can give no more than all of myself, I feel my heart is a throbbing engine and my voice is the valve, like a wailing train, it has to sing or blow up, there's too much fuel, too much fire, and what am I to do with this voice if I can't let it out, it's not just singing. I am here as a speck, but I don't feel scared or about to be blown away, I feel like all New York is a warm embrace just waiting to enfold me. I am in love. But not with a person. I am passionately in love with my life.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“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.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“You think you're safe. Until you see a picture like that. And then you know you'll always be a slave to the present because the present is more powerful than the past, no matter how long ago the present happened.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“The thief you must fear the most is not the one who steals mere things.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“What is the good of believing fervently in God if you wind up hating Him?”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“Materia had been just six when they docked in Sydney Harbour and her father said, 'Look. This is the New World. Anything is possible here.' She's been too young to realize that he was talking to her brother.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“Lies like that are not a sin, they are a sacrifice.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“Writing. Opening a vein in your wrist with a spoon.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“As time went by, it mattered less and less that in 1969 a rocket went from Florida to the moon and men walked there. Good men. People's dads. Those were only events, scattered in time. Draw them close, rub them between thumb and finger till they look like larvae, soften like silk, distend to knot, to weave. It takes a village to kill a child.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“She learns a valuable lesson: if you think you are good, just try doing good. You’ll soon find out how inadequate your little drop of goodness is.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“My first advantage: I have everything. My second advantage: this is just another island. My third advantage: I am bigger than it all.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“She is why purgatory was invented.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“Tell the story, gather the events, repeat them. Pattern is a matter of upkeep. Otherwise the weave relaxes back to threads picked up by birds to make their nests. Repeat, or the story will fall and all the king's horses and all the king's men. . . . Repeat, and cradle the pieces carefully, or events will scatter like marbles on a wooden floor.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“Having experienced her own disappearance, she is conscious of how important it is for people to be seen, so when she looks at them --even the blind one--she also looks for them, just in case they too have got lost and need finding.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“She wonders when it was that she began to despair. All these years she mistook it for pious resignation. Now she sees the difference. Such a fine line between a state of grace and a state of mortal sin. What is the good of believing fervently in God if you wind up hating Him?”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“But I have discovered something about modest people. They're just waiting for the call. Then they are the first over the wall and into the temple.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“Piece by piece living is hard to do. It may even feel like the hardest thing. But it has this going for it: you never need to know what it is you're carrying on your shoulders.”
― ann-marie macdonald

“He would have enough money...for a family that would fill his house with beautiful music and the silence of good books.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

“It's his last thrill and his last sting of love, as fresh and painful as youth transplanted over time and an ocean. There is nothing left for him now except to die, but that will take a while because he is a creature of habit, and he has got into the habit of being alive.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees