Mavis Gallant Quotes & Sayings

A woman can always get some practical use from a torn-up life ... She likes mending and patching it, making sure the edges are straight. She spreads the last shred out and takes its measure: 'What can I do with this remnant? How long does it need to last?
A man puts on his life ready-made. If it doesn't fit, he will try to exchange it for another. Only a fool of a man will try to adjust the sleeves or move the buttons; he doesn't know how. — Mavis Gallant

I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live. — Mavis Gallant

Appeals to memory were never perfectly answered. — Mavis Gallant

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way. — Mavis Gallant

Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled ... — Mavis Gallant

I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn't even look to see if there was water in the pool. — Mavis Gallant

No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them, as if the half-empty cafe were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away. — Mavis Gallant

Spring had been the season for dying in the old days. Invalids who had struggled through the dark comfort of winter took fright as the night receded. — Mavis Gallant

Presently Arnaud folded the paper napkin, in the same careful way he always folded a table napkin, and said I ought to follow Chantal's suggestion and get a job in teaching a nursery school. (So Maman had mentioned that to Mme. Pons, too) I should teach until I had enough working time behind me to claim a pension. It would be good for me in my old age to have an income of my own. Anything could happen. He could be killed in a train crash or called up for a war. My father could easily be ruined in a lawsuit and die covered with debts. There were advantages to teaching, such as long holidays and reduced train fares.
"How long would it take?" I said. "Before I could stop teaching and get my pension."
"Thirty-five years," said Arnaud. "I'll ask my mother. She had no training, either, but she taught private classes. All you need is a decent background and some recommendations. — Mavis Gallant

Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait. — Mavis Gallant

The late Mavis Gallant told the Paris Review that writing is like "a love affair: the beginning is the best part. I write every day. It is not a burden. It is the way I live. — Mavis Gallant

She was a pretty girl, with a pointed face and blue-black hair. But she was an untidy, a dusty sort of girl, and you felt that in a few years something might go wrong; she might get swollen ankles or grow a mustache. — Mavis Gallant

I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist. If it is child's play, an extension of make believe - something one is frequently assured by people who write about writing - how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a bicycle over the Alps? — Mavis Gallant

Marie, now Mme. Driscoll, turned to Berthe and smiled, as she used to when they were children. Once again, the smile said, Have I done the right thing? Is this what you wanted? Yes, yes, said Berthe silently, but she went on crying. — Mavis Gallant

Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever. — Mavis Gallant

Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part. — Mavis Gallant

Like his father, like Jules Renard, he had been carried along the slow, steady swindle of history and experience. — Mavis Gallant

A short story is what you see when you look out of the window. — Mavis Gallant

All immigration is based on misapprehension. — Mavis Gallant

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct. — Mavis Gallant

There is a term for people caught on a street crossing after the light has changed: "pedestrian-traffic residue". — Mavis Gallant

All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner. — Mavis Gallant

Converts have it soft," said Mary. "They come to it late, without ever having had the Devil under the bed. They sail in and admire the stained-glass windows. All the dirty work has been done. — Mavis Gallant

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy. — Mavis Gallant

I am not interested in theories, she had taught herself to say, for fear of being invaded by something other than a dream.
But she was not certain what she meant and not sure that it was true. — Mavis Gallant

She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient. — Mavis Gallant

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express. — Mavis Gallant

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift. — Mavis Gallant

The older I get the more grateful I am not to be told how everything comes out. — Mavis Gallant

Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story - or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall - is, Is it dead or alive? — Mavis Gallant