Elizabeth Hay > Quotes

“She would always be living her life backwards, she realized, trying to regain something perfect that she'd lost.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air

“You stand next to the sea and you're in touch with all your longings and all your losses.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air

“And when is it ever convincing, the belief others have in your abilities? You know perfectly well they can't see the mess inside you.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Alone in the Classroom

“A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone, and it’s marvelous for the stone and marvelous for the teacher.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Alone in the Classroom

“We look so very different from the way we sound. It’s a shock, similar to hearing your own voice for the first time, when you’re forced to wonder how the rest of you comes across if you sound nothing like the way you think you sound. You feel dislodged from the old shoe of yourself.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air

“Oh Harry," [Gwen] said. "I wish I were a different kind of person."

What kind of person, he wanted to know.

"Someone," she said slowly, "who truly loves life."

He was still looking at her, still cradling his glasses in his left hand. He said, "You're the kind of person who never stops trying.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air

“The older you get, the closer your loves are to the surface. She was breathing rarefied air, the ether you come upon at high altitudes. I understood finally how long-held grievances and petty smallnesses might get burned off, and pure creativity and humour remain.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Alone in the Classroom

“I usually describe my father as a man given to impenetrable solitude. If I turn the phrase I can apply it to Johnny. Impenetrable happiness. For a long time I couldn't enter his life because his happiness, or appearance of happiness - his unending smiles - locked the door. An ingenious strategy, to surround the thorns with a castle.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Small Change

“And then he only had eyes for the pie. Watch any man, he could be ninety years old and drooling spit, but at the sight of homemade pie every last one of his wits will spring to attention.”
― Elizabeth Hay, A Student of Weather

“You see the same plain landscape day after day, and then one day, perhaps it's the play of light or the time of year, you find it beautiful and other landscapes at fault. So it must be with fashion. Ordinary judgement falls into abeyance and something else, some bewitchment, takes over. How else to explain the appeal of garments that in a few years look so ridiculous?”
― Elizabeth Hay, A Student of Weather

“She would always be careful around people like Parley Burns, tricky people who are thin skinned and punitive and intelligent and surprisingly honest.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Alone in the Classroom

“How attraction works, making one's body almost painfully alive and one's thoughts concentrated, also painfully. And the truth of these powerful attractions - they have their own morality and nothing else matters.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Alone in the Classroom

“When you take things personally, she knew, the world becomes very small. It is you and nothing is smaller. When you manage not to do that, the world opens wide.”
― Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life

“Where do they come from, these things that say more than we know and more than we intend?”
― Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life

“You stay loyal to what increasingly disappoints you. It happens all the time.”
― Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life

“her voice sounded like a tarnished silver spoon.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air

“They were like an iceberg, it occurred to me, my father the seven-eighths that was under the water and my mother the luminous portion riding the waves. But no, they were two icebergs: solitary phenomena, impressive, independent, known only to themselves. I felt their hidden seven-eighths inside me as a dark bulkiness whose outlines I was always trying to map.”
― Elizabeth Hay, All Things Consoled: A Daughter's Memoir

“Jim enjoyed watching people take sides. It increased the drama and he loved the drama. Yet it worried him too, since he wanted people to like each other and he wanted to be on the right side, the brave and exciting side.”
― Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life

“The phrase that came to her mind was "the long and sudden of I." We go on and on through the long months of our lives until we hit a sudden moment that stuns us.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air

“The mistakes don't matter," he informed her one night after she stumbled over a station ID and apologized on air. "It's the recovery that counts."

If she had a nickel for every one of his smiles, she'd have ten cents. She nodded sheepishly, preferring Harry's way of phrasing the same point. "I learned that a mistake is just something you go on from." Harry's advice gave her a route to follow, a path forward. Somehow Eddy managed to exchange one form of stress for another.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air

“Her life had seen many more sunsets than sunrises and it was probably time to even the score.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Snow Road Station

“Who's to say we can't have many loves and many identities? we can hold more in our heads than we think.”
― Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life

“You're brave to have driven all this way."
Gwen considered for a moment whether this made her brave. In truth, she was always afraid, always worried. She shook her head. "Like I said, I've always wanted to come north for as long as I can remember."
"Three thousand miles!"
"Yes," still unimpressed by herself," but I never went over fifty.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air

“You run over a part of yourself when you run over something that has such a place in your heart.”
― Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life

“A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone, and it’s marvellous for the stone and marvellous for the teacher.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Alone in the Classroom

“But some feelings take a long time, they sort of grow behind your back. You turn around thirty years later and there they are.”
― Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life

“That's always the question. How to defend yourself without being nasty.”
― Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life

“So how did you get to be so wise?”
It seemed she might not answer his question, but she did. “I read, she smiled, and he chuckled. Small-town honesty. He could recognize it a mile away. Small-town honesty, and big city drive.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air

“The worst things were cowardly acts of betrayal. Betraying a friend and in the process betraying yourself. He knew all about that.”
― Elizabeth Hay

“They were like an iceberg, it occurred to me, my father the seven-sights that was under the water and my mother the luminous portion riding the waves. But no, they were two icebergs: solitary phenomena, impressive, independent, known only to themselves. I felt their hidden seven-eighths inside me as a dark bulkiness whose outlines I was always trying to map.”
― Elizabeth Hay, All Things Consoled: A Daughter's Memoir