Alistair MacLeod > Quotes

“All of us are better when we're loved.”
― Alistair MacLeod

“No one has ever said that life is to be easy. Only that it is to be lived.”
― Alistair MacLeod, Island: Collected Stories

“And then there came into my heart a very great love for my father and I thought it was very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations.”
― Alistair MacLeod

“And I am overwhelmed now by the awfulness of over-simplification. For now I realize that not only have I been guilty of it through this long and burning day but also through most of my yet young life and it is only now that I am doubly its victim that I begin to vaguely understand. For I had somehow thought that ‘going away’ was but a physical thing. And that it had only to do with movement and with labels like the silly ‘Vancouver’ that I had glibly rolled from off my tongue; or with the crossing of bodies of water or with the boundaries of borders. And because my father told me I was ‘free’ I had foolishly felt that it was really so. Just like that. And I realize now that the older people of my past are more complicated than perhaps I had ever thought. And that there are distinctions between my sentimental, romantic grandfather and his love for coal, and my stern and practical grandmother her hatred of it; and my quietly strong but passive mother and the souring extremes of my father’s passionate violence and the quiet power of his love. They are all so different. Perhaps it is possible I think now to be both and yet to see only one. For the man in whose glassed-in car I now sit sees only similarity. For him the people of this multi-scarred little town are reduced to but a few phrases and the act of sexual intercourse. They are only so many identical goldfish leading identical, incomprehensible lives within the glass prison of their bowl. And the people on the street view me from behind my own glass in much the same way and it is the way that I have looked at others in their ‘foreign licence’ cars and it is the kind of judgment that I myself have made. And yet it seems that neither these people nor this man are in any way unkind and not to understand does not necessarily mean that one is cruel. But one should at least be honest. And perhaps I have tried too hard to be someone else without realizing at first what I presently am. I do not know. I am not sure. But I do know that I cannot follow this man into a house that is so much like the one I have left this morning and go down into the sexual embrace of a woman who might well be my mother. And I do not know what she, my mother, may be like in the years to come when she is deprived of the lighting movement of my father’s body and the hammered pounding of his heart. For I do not know when he may die. And I do not know in what darkness she may cry out his name nor to whom. I do not know very much of anything, it seems, except that I have been wrong and dishonest with others and myself. And perhaps this man has left footprints on a soul I did not even know that I possessed.”
― Alistair MacLeod, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

“Writers write about what worries them.”
― Alistair MacLeod

“Measure twice; cut once.”
― Alistair MacLeod, Island: The Complete Stories

“Sometimes it slanted against her window with a pinging sound, which meant it was close to hail, and then it was visible as tiny pellets for a moment on the pane before the pellets vanished and rolled quietly down the glass, each drop leaving its own delicate trickle. At other times it fell straight down, hardly touching the window at all, but still there beyond the glass, like a delicate, beaded curtain at the entrance to another room.”
― Alistair MacLeod, Island: Collected Stories

“Music is the lubricant of the poor.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief

“The “lamp of the poor” is hardly visible in urban southwestern Ontario, although there are many poor who move disjointedly beneath it. And the stars are seldom clearly seen above the pollution of prosperity.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief

“On a clear day you can see Prince Edward Island, we would say. Not "forever", just Prince Edward Island.”
― Alistair MacLeod, Island: The Complete Stories

“Some men,” she would add in ominous seriousness, “are nice as pie in public but within their own homes they are mean and miserly to those who have to live with them all the time. No one, perhaps, knows this except those who are captive within their houses.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief

“As an individual struggling with a language not his own he was difficult to dislike.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief

“There is no word in Gaelic for good-bye, only for farewell.”
― Alistair MacLeod, Island: The Complete Stories

“Talking about history is not like living it, I guess. Some people have more choice than others.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief

“And perhaps I have tried too hard to be someone else without realizing at first what I presently am.”
― Alistair MacLeod, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

“Sometimes when he would tell me those stories his eyes would fill with tears. People used to say he was sentimental, but it was because he cared. He felt everything deeply. People around here used to call a man like him ‘soft.’ ‘Maybe so,’ he used to say, ‘but I’m always hard when I have to be, you know that.’ He was full of little double meanings like that, my husband.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief

“When the Canada geese fly north in spring, there is a leader who points the way, a leader at the apex of the V as the formation moves across the land. Those who follow must believe that the leader is doing the best he can but there is no guarantee that all journeys will end in salvation for everyone involved.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief

“I never thought a [daughter] of mine would choose useless books over the parents that gave [her] life”
― Alistair MacLeod, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

“Almost intermixed with the animals are the Masai following the grass cycle with their cattle herds, living off the milk and blood of their cows. We would go early in the morning from a base camp in Land Rovers and all-terrain vehicles, armed with cameras and binoculars. The tour operators apologized for the presence of the Masai.”
― Alistair MacLeod

“Perhaps that’s why he became so interested in history, […] He felt that if you read everything and put the pieces all together the real truth would emerge. It would be, somehow, like carpentry. Everything would fit together just so, and you would see in the end something like ‘a perfect building called the past.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief

“There are many things that people will do in the dark that they will not do in light.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief

“Do you have children?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Do they make their own beds?”
“Well, sometimes,” I reply.
“You should encourage them to make their own beds,” she says. “It’s good training for life.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief