Peter Behrens > Quotes

“Marriage is a mystery.”
― Peter Behrens, The O'Briens

“What you lost weakened you, could kill you. What you wanted kept you going. What you wanted gave you strength.”
― Peter Behrens, The Law of Dreams

“Is courage just the awareness that gestures, journeys, lives have intrinsic shape, and must, one way or another, be completed?”
― Peter Behrens, The Law of Dreams

“Sooner or later everyone disguises themselves and where they have been and what they have done.”
― Peter Behrens, The Law of Dreams

“Stories always started this way, suddenly, and set within a strange world. Patience is required, to let the stories unroll. This is how people explan their lives.”
― Peter Behrens, The Law of Dreams

“He had seen men nearly killed in fights and logging accidents, but his mother’s was the first corpse he had seen, and apart from its stillness what struck him was how fragile, insubstantial, and temporary her body seemed. Ellenora’s struggles and losses, her hard work and suffering, had developed from meagre flesh and sinew, a collection of fragile bones. It seemed extraordinary that a body could house the energy a mind produced, the secret powers to love and hate, forget and remember.”
― Peter Behrens, The O'Briens

“I don't want to lose you over tedious genealogy and history that must be very dim to you. This is a story of real people who lived and died, about their times and what went wrong. I shall try to be honest even when it's apparent that I am making things up, delivering scenes I couldn't have witnessed.

I know the truth in my bones. And that's what I shall give you.”
― Peter Behrens, Carry Me

“I was suddenly afraid she was going to climb the rail and leap into the sea.

But maybe she wasn't. Maybe it was a delusion, my delusion. Maybe it was the fever coming on.

Maybe what I really experienced on the steamer was the frightening, awe-inspiring sense we had been cut loose, were beyond the sight of land, lost.

After all, what sort of woman, clutching the hand of her little boy, would actually consider climbing a ship's rail and leaping out into the Irish Sea?

What sort of woman would consider stepping off a London bus into crowds, into oblivion?

Only a woman penniless in wartime. Only a woman traveling into exile. Only a woman who suspects, from redness around his eyes and a croak in his voice, that her son has a life-threatening bout of scarlet fever coming on. Only a woman whose husband is a prisoner, whose father is a tyrant. Only a woman exhausted by life.”
― Peter Behrens, Carry Me

“This will become the story of a young woman, Karin Weinbrenner. Her story is not mine, but sometimes her story feels like the armature my life has wound itself around. I am telling it, so this story is also about me.”
― Peter Behrens, Carry Me

“House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored”
― Peter Behrens, The O'Briens

“Perhaps if I had been able to put things in plain language, it might have been plain that things between us were so damnably unequal, that I loved her as I would never love anyone else and that she loved me as a young woman might love a devoted brother, a trusted bodyguard, or a horse that never stumbles, never shies, but takes all fences willingly, and carries her safely across.”
― Peter Behrens, Carry Me

“autumn leaves and earth. She wondered if Margo might be willing to drive down to Maine with her for one last holiday. October light was gorgeous at the beach and they could have a”
― Peter Behrens, The O'Briens

“When we were apart and I thought of her, I left words out of it. What came to mind instead were flashes of bold color in sunlight. And always an impression of wide-open country and the pair of us traveling, alone together, great distance at great speed.”
― Peter Behrens, Carry Me

“Burning aviators, clots of fire. The reeking night jar in our bedroom in Muswell Hill. Children skipping round me in a school yard, shouting taunts. My ship Lilith. London's winter cold and dark. The smell of ground sliced open in Regent's Park, my father's pale prisoner's face, his white hands on a table in the visiting hall. There it is. That was my war.”
― Peter Behrens, Carry Me

“You throw yourself on the world like turf on a fire.”
― Peter Behrens, The Law of Dreams

“Where do they come from, thoughts?
Like wrens, out of the sky.
They arrive.
Noisy, hungry, perfectly themselves.”
― Peter Behrens, The Law of Dreams