Kathleen Winter Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 26 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Kathleen Winter.
Famous Quotes By Kathleen Winter
They can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants. Safety is not what it wants. The material world is not what it wants either. — Kathleen Winter
... People are rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It is not fair, to treat people as if they are finished beings. Everyone is always becoming and unbecoming. — Kathleen Winter
Summer sky swallowed colour, but the sky of late August made colour ricochet back to earth, and there were sharp edges on all the buildings and curbs and even on the leaves of the trees and on the impatiens in the flowerbeds of all the towns through which Wayne travelled to reach Wally Michelin. — Kathleen Winter
Whenever she imagined her child, grown up without interference from a judgemental world, she imagined its male and female halves as complementing each other, and as being secretly, almost magically powerful. — Kathleen Winter
He wished at that moment that his whole life had not been a secret, that lots of people were like him, instead of his being alone in a world where everyone was secure in their place as either woman or man. His aloneness was what made him feel ashamed, and he did not know why it had to be so. — Kathleen Winter
Sometimes you had to be who you were and endure what happened to you, and to you alone, before you could understand the first thing about it. — Kathleen Winter
When the child separates from its parents to explore the new world, the parents can do one of two things. They can fight it with rules, pleading, tears and anger: 'Why do you want to go out in minus-fifteen-degree temperatures in that T-shirt when you could wear the wool I've warmed for you over the woodstove? It's so cosy.' Or they can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants Safety is not what it wants. — Kathleen Winter
Point of view is everything. — Kathleen Winter
Wally Michelin had stomped through kindergarten and grades one and two with a certainty Wayne found fascinating . . . Wayne was in love with her from the moment he heard her crumbly voice. So in love he wished he could become her. If there was a way he could make himself into a ghost without a body - a shadow - or transparent like the lures his father used to catch Arctic char, he would have done it. He would have transformed into his father's lure, slipped under Wally Michelin's divinely freckled skin, and lived inside her, looking through her eyes. — Kathleen Winter
She knew happiness was only one side of the coin and the coin was forever turning . . . Thomasina had every reason to be happy, but instead she held her heart at the same level she had always held it, because she did not trust extremes of feeling. — Kathleen Winter
He was a soft-hearted man when it came to anyone he felt was less practically talented than himself, and this covered a lot of people. He would help a man split wood, build a house, or cut a hole in the right place in the ice, not to show off his superior skills but to save the man time. He did these things out of pure helpfulness, with kindness thrown in. — Kathleen Winter
A lot of things can go out of order in a lonely house over a lonely autumn and the start of winter, without other people in the village knowing, especially if that village prides itself on an independent spirit. — Kathleen Winter
Everyone was trying to define everything so carefully, Jacinta felt; they wanted to annihilate all questions. — Kathleen Winter
She liked the way he chose a good coat and wore it for five years and then chose another one similar to it. — Kathleen Winter
It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming. — Kathleen Winter
You might want to sit in public squares and people watch for an hour in one place and a month in another. I can tell by the way you're peeling that grapefruit. You want to get lost. Somewhere where they have ordinary life you can join in. Slip right in there and have a bowl of soup in the clothes you have on now. Go hear a concert you read about stapled to a telephone pole. There are lots of places like that in the world. — Kathleen Winter
She waited the eternal instant that women wait when a horror jumps out at them. It is an instant that men do not use for waiting, an instant that opens a door to life or death. Women look through the opening because something might be alive in there. — Kathleen Winter
Why would a white caribou come down to Beaver River, where the woodland herd lives? Why would she leave the Arctic tundra, where the light blazes incandescent, to haunt these shadows? Why would any caribou leave her herd to walk, solitary, thousands of miles? The herd is comfort. The herd is a fabric you can't cut or tear, passing over the land. If you could see the herd from the sky, if you were a falcon or a king eider, it would appear like softly floating gauze over the face of the snow, no more substantial than a cloud. "We are soft," the herd whispers. "We have no top teeth. We do not tear flesh. We do not tear at any part of life. We are gentleness itself. Why would any of us break from the herd? Break, apart, separate, these are hard words. The only reason any of us would become one, and not part of the herd, is if she were lost. — Kathleen Winter
He wanted to throw the pills away and wait and see what would happen to his body. How much of his body image was accurate and how much was a construct he had come to believe? He tried to see his body objectively. — Kathleen Winter
A peregrine falcon," a passenger said, "lives at 2180 Yonge Street in Toronto, on the corner of Yonge and Eglinton. It sits high on the Canadian Tire building, hunts from there, brings prey, and in full view of everyone in the offices, tears it to pieces. Blood everywhere. — Kathleen Winter
Wayne had never been able to love the dog Treadway brought home the day he dismantled the Ponte Vecchio. He wanted to love the dog but he couldn't, and he blamed his father. The dog deserved love. — Kathleen Winter
Wayne tried to remember a time before he knew the word for sky. You explained away the mystery of the night, he thought, by naming its parts: darkness, Little Dipper, silver birch. — Kathleen Winter
The politeness was unbearable. They avoided touching each other, careful as strangers on a train ... A family can go on for years without the love that once bound it together, like a lovely old wall that stays standing long after rain has crumbled the mortar. — Kathleen Winter
The lullaby had the kind of tune everyone thinks they've heard before but can't remember where. A tune like that floats in the air all the time and now and then you catch it. — Kathleen Winter
It came from a different person, a person who had learned how to build a voice from the ruins up, a person who had lost everything and had begun from having worse than nothing. A person who had not given up believing that she sang, that music would come to her because she wanted it to come, and it had to come, and she would use everything in her power to encourage it to do so. — Kathleen Winter
I think my writing process changes as I gain more life experience ... It has taken me many years to be able to write a novel that shows the points of view of people of different ages and personalities. — Kathleen Winter