Gina Berriault Quotes & Sayings

Oh, take the liberty! That's what I would have done if Ethan and Mattie had run off together and left me on this forsaken farm. I would have packed my satchel and my portmanteau and climbed aboard a train bound West, and gazed out the window at what there was to see across this vast country. City spires in the midst of wheatfields, and miles of chards with fruit on the bough, and high bridges over broad rivers, and mountains of clouds the likes of which I'd never seen, and birds of a kind I'd never seen before. And there'd be a city where I'd stay, and there'd be an old couple in a fine house of many rooms, and I'd tend them and see
they kept neat, and on my days off I'd wind my black hair in a fashionable way with tortoiseshell combs, and hold my head high, and go out to see what that city had to offer. — Gina Berriault

One thing I'd do was put a great writer's book beside the typewriter and ... type out a beautiful and moving paragraph ... and see those sentences rising up ... and ... think, 'Someday maybe I can write like that ... ' It was like a dream of possibilities for my own self. And maybe I began to know that there was no other way for the sentence ... to ... arouse the same feeling. The someone writing whose words were rising from the typewriter became like a mentor for me ... You shouldn't do it more than a few times because you must get on with your own work. — Gina Berriault

It's over me like a ton of water, the things I don't know. — Gina Berriault

Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry
with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down the eternal moment. — Gina Berriault

The day was cold, and every time the little transparent fans of water swept in and drew back, the wet sand mirrored a clear sky and the sun on its way down. — Gina Berriault

Some days after, the girl encountered her again, in a dream, as she was years ago: a very slender young woman in a long white skirt, her amber hair to her waist, her eyes coal black with ardor. — Gina Berriault