Elizabeth Hay Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

Movement always helps. A world of thoughts occurred to her whenever she rode a train, and a lesser world whenever she went for a walk. — Elizabeth Hay

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

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

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

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

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

You stand next to the sea and you're in touch with all your longings and all your losses. — Elizabeth Hay

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

She would always be living her life backwards, she realized, trying to regain something perfect that she'd lost. — Elizabeth Hay