Kathleen Winter > Quotes

“…People are rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It is not fair, to treat people as if they are finished beings. Everyone is always becoming and unbecoming.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“Sometimes you had to be who you were and endure what happened to you, and to you alone, before you could understand the first thing about it.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“Whenever she imagined her child, grown up without interference from a judgemental world, she imagined its male and female halves as complementing each other, and as being secretly, almost magically powerful.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“The lullaby had the kind of tune everyone thinks they've heard before but can't remember where. A tune like that floats in the air all the time and now and then you catch it.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“This was a passage in which everyone moved and was unfathomable, which was how Thomasina saw people. She was not a person who froze someone's character in her mind, calling this one egotistical and that one not nearly confident enough and another one truthful or untruthful. To Thomasina people were rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“If a person knits as you speak of the past, you can become mesmerized. As the yarn unwinds from its skein your memories naturally unfold to their full length.”
― Kathleen Winter, Lost in September

“She waited the eternal instant that women wait when a horror jumps out at them. It is an instant that men do not use for waiting, an instant that opens a door to life or death. Women look through the opening because something might be alive in there.”
― Kathleen Winter

“It came from a different person, a person who had learned how to build a voice from the ruins up, a person who had lost everything and had begun from having worse than nothing. A person who had not given up believing that she sang, that music would come to her because she wanted it to come, and it had to come, and she would use everything in her power to encourage it to do so.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“He wished at that moment that his whole life had not been a secret, that lots of people were like him, instead of his being alone in a world where everyone was secure in their place as either woman or man. His aloneness was what made him feel ashamed, and he did not know why it had to be so.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“Comoditatea nu e deloc ceea ce-si doreste tineretea abia trezita. Siguranta nu e deloc ceea ce-si doreste. Nici lumea materiala nu e deloc ceea ce-si doreste.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“You might want to sit in public squares and people watch for an hour in one place and a month in another. I can tell by the way you're peeling that grapefruit. You want to get lost. Somewhere where they have ordinary life you can join in. Slip right in there and have a bowl of soup in the clothes you have on now. Go hear a concert you read about stapled to a telephone pole. There are lots of places like that in the world.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“Why would a white caribou come down to Beaver River, where the woodland herd lives? Why would she leave the Arctic tundra, where the light blazes incandescent, to haunt these shadows? Why would any caribou leave her herd to walk, solitary, thousands of miles? The herd is comfort. The herd is a fabric you can't cut or tear, passing over the land. If you could see the herd from the sky, if you were a falcon or a king eider, it would appear like softly floating gauze over the face of the snow, no more substantial than a cloud. "We are soft," the herd whispers. "We have no top teeth. We do not tear flesh. We do not tear at any part of life. We are gentleness itself. Why would any of us break from the herd? Break, apart, separate, these are hard words. The only reason any of us would become one, and not part of the herd, is if she were lost.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“Wayne tried to remember a time before he knew the word for sky. You explained away the mystery of the night, he thought, by naming its parts: darkness, Little Dipper, silver birch.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“Summer sky swallowed colour, but the sky of late August made colour ricochet back to earth, and there were sharp edges on all the buildings and curbs and even on the leaves of the trees and on the impatiens in the flowerbeds of all the towns through which Wayne travelled to reach Wally Michelin.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“When the child separates from its parents to explore the new world, the parents can do one of two things. They can fight it with rules, pleading, tears and anger: 'Why do you want to go out in minus-fifteen-degree temperatures in that T-shirt when you could wear the wool I've warmed for you over the woodstove? It's so cosy.' Or they can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants Safety is not what it wants.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“Point of view is everything.”
― Kathleen Winter

“She knew happiness was only one side of the coin and the coin was forever turning . . . Thomasina had every reason to be happy, but instead she held her heart at the same level she had always held it, because she did not trust extremes of feeling.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“The politeness was unbearable. They avoided touching each other, careful as strangers on a train. . . A family can go on for years without the love that once bound it together, like a lovely old wall that stays standing long after rain has crumbled the mortar.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“Wally Michelin had stomped through kindergarten and grades one and two with a certainty Wayne found fascinating . . . Wayne was in love with her from the moment he heard her crumbly voice. So in love he wished he could become her. If there was a way he could make himself into a ghost without a body - a shadow - or transparent like the lures his father used to catch Arctic char, he would have done it. He would have transformed into his father’s lure, slipped under Wally Michelin’s divinely freckled skin, and lived inside her, looking through her eyes.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“She liked the way he chose a good coat and wore it for five years and then chose another one similar to it.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“It came from a different person, a person who had learned how to build a voice from the ruins up, a person who had lost everything and had begun from having worse than nothing.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“Wayne had never been able to love the dog Treadway brought home the day he dismantled the Ponte Vecchio. He wanted to love the dog but he couldn’t, and he blamed his father. “The dog deserved love.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“He had to remind himself that the work of a surgeon is poetry of a kind, in which blood is the meaning and flesh is the text.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“Wayne had never been able to love the dog Treadway brought home the day he dismantled the Ponte Vecchio. He wanted to love the dog but he couldn’t, and he blamed his father. “The dog deserved love.”

“I know. Love gets blocked if you dam it. Your father builds dams in his sleep. He doesn’t know he’s doing it.” Wayne had a dog he could not love though he wanted to love it, and Treadway had a son he could not love though he wanted a son and he wanted to love that son. Father and son suffered from backed up, frozen love, and this ate Jacinta’s heart.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“He wanted to throw the pills away and wait and see what would happen to his body. How much of his body image was accurate and how much was a construct he had come to believe? He tried to see his body objectively.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“A traveller can come to Labrador and feel its magnetic energy or not feel it. There has to be a question in the person. The visitor has to be an open circuit, available to the power coming off the land, and not everybody is. And it is the same with a person born in Labrador. Some know, from birth, that their homeland has a respiratory system, that it pulls energy from rock and mountain and water and gravitational activity beyond earth, and that it breathes energy in return. And others don’t know it.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“They can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants. Safety is not what it wants. The material world is not what it wants either.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“... because I read about them. Anything I know about I've usually read, even a lot of what I know about trapping. I get a lot from books.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“A lot of things can go out of order in a lonely house over a lonely autumn and the start of winter, without other people in the village knowing, especially if that village prides itself on an independent spirit.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel