Ethel Wilson > Quotes

“A first meeting. A meeting in the desert, a meeting at sea, meeting in the city, meeting at night, meeting at a grave, meeting in the sunshine beside the forest, beside water. Human beings meet, yet the meetings are not the same. Meeting partakes in its very essence not only of the persons but of the place of meeting. And that essence of place remains, and colours, faintly, the association, perhaps forever.
Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990 (page 95).”
― Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel

“What a land. What power these rivers were already yielding, far beyond her sight. Even a map of this country--lines arranged in an arbitrary way on a long rectangular piece of paper-- stirs the imagination beyond imagination, she thought, looking at the map, as other lines differently arranged in relation to each other have not the power to stir. Each name on the map says "We reached this point, by broken trail and mountains and water; and when we reached it, thus and thus we named it.”
― Ethel Wilson

“There is a beautiful action. It has an operative grace. It is when one, seeing some uneasy sleeper cold and without a cover, goes away, finds and fetches a blanket, bends down, and covers the sleeper because the sleeper is a living being and is cold. He then returns to his work, forgetting he has performed this small act of compassion. He will receive neither praise nor thanks. It does not matter who the sleeper may be. That is a beautiful action which is divine and human in posture and intention and self-forgetfulness.”
― Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel

“As he embraced her amiably there came to him on a sudden the disturbing pang of love, a sort of celestial corkscrew.”
― Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel

“When the little sliver of jealousy ran into her flesh, she did not pull it out. Her flesh festered pleasantly around the sliver. She indulged in the pleasure of the pain of her small growing jealousy. Since jealousy is a luxury which soon becomes a necessity to those who have felt its sharp enthralling pain, Vera became unhappy again.”
― Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel

“With all her fine talk and with all her high thinking she had not been able to deal with one unhappy human being.”
― Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel

“Yes, thought Maggie, it was lonely but it was nice there. The picket fence and the crosses would be covered by snow in the winter. Then the spring sunshine beating on the hillside would melt the snow, and the snow would run off, and the crosses would stand revealed again. And in the spring the Canada geese would pass in their arrows of flight, honking, honking, high over the silent hillside. Later in the season, when the big white moon was full, coyotes would sing among the hills at night, on and on in the moonlight, stopping, and then all beginning again together. Spring flowers would come — a few — in the coarse grass. Then, in the heat of the summer, bright small snakes and beetles would slip through the grasses, and the crickets would dryly sing. Then the sumac would turn scarlet, and the skeins of wild geese would return in their swift pointed arrows of flight to the south, passing high overhead between the great hills. Their musical cry would drop down into the valley lying in silence. Then would come the snow, and the three wooden crosses would be covered again. It was indeed very nice there”
― Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel