Timothy Findley Quotes & Sayings

With every new manoeuvre, the light was growing dimmer
fading by numbers as well as strength
and the sound could no longer be heard, but only the pulse of it
seen going out in the darkness
losing its edges
caving in at its centre
webbing, now, as if a spider was spinning against the rain
until the last few strands of brightness fell
and were extinguished
silenced and removed from life and from all that lives forever.
And the bell tolled
but the ark, as ever, was adamant. Its shape had taken on a voice. And the voice said: no. — Timothy Findley

Complaints about reality are immature. — Timothy Findley

The spaces between the perceiver and the thing perceived can [ ... ] be closed with a shout of recognition. — Timothy Findley

People can only be found in what they do. — Timothy Findley

You die when you can't be real, Dolly thought. When you can't see who you are and when you cannot see what it. — Timothy Findley

Master Stuart made his letters into paper darts and launched them page by page from the roof of the house-watching them descend and fade into the green ravine below ... Some he saved to trade at school for other artifacts of war sent home by other elder brothers like his own-but only the letters mailed from France were worthy of this exchange. They had to have the smell of fire. — Timothy Findley

I have dreamt of a life you will never know; the life of a loving and caring companion. I simply thought you should know. I see that you are in trouble. I watch and listen to you. I want to help, but you won't let me. So be it. I love you still. Do what you will, I shall watch over you. — Timothy Findley

Literature was intended to be dangerous. Art was meant to be dangerous. Ideas were nothing if they were not dangerous. — Timothy Findley

He said that in a way being loved is like being told you never have to die. — Timothy Findley

Time is light, time is dark. You either dance, or you fall. — Timothy Findley

My whole life is out here-the whole of my life ... I'd come here naked, as a boy-straight from that river out there-throw my clothes on the floor and climb into that loft and lie there dreaming in the hay ... All those summer days-scouring the banks of the Avon for smooth, round stones-scaring up ducks and foxes-kingfishers-swallows ... somebody's dog ... Oh, God-I want it back. Throwing stones that never reached the other shore. And the games-the games-the games, and all my friends ... — Timothy Findley

I still maintain that an ordinary human being has the right to be horrified by a mangled body seen on an afternoon walk. — Timothy Findley

Music is the worst of them - roiling and boiling - overly emotionalized on the one hand, overly intellectuallized on the other. Bach and Mozart indeed! Bach inevitably makes me think of fish in a barrel! round and round and round they go and nothing ever happens. Nothing ! Tum -de-dum-dum. Tum -de-dum-dum and that's all! Tum -de-dum-de-bloody-dum-dum! As for Mozart, his emotions did not mature beyond the age of twelve. never achieved adolescence, let alone puberty. his music merely combines a popular talent for slapstick and a commercial talent for tears. No - not tears. For sobs. Beethoven, pompous. Chopin - sickly sweet and given to tantrums - Tum -de-dum-dum- Bang! and Wagner - a self -centred bore. and Stravinsky - discordant, rude and blows his music through his nose — Timothy Findley

Here was an unknown quantity-a child in breeches with a blue scarf wound around his neck whose job it was to get them out and back alive. This ... was the greatest terror of war: what you didn't know of the men who told you what to do-where to go and when. What if they were mad-or stupid? What if their fear was greater than yours? Or what if they were brave and crazy-wanting and demanding bravery from you? He looked away. He thought of being born-and trusting your parents. Maybe that was the same. Your parents could be crazy too. Or stupid. Still-he'd rather his father was with him-telling him what to do. Then he smiled. He knew that his father would take one look at the crater and tell him not to go. — Timothy Findley

What you people who weren't yet born can never know is what it meant to sleep in cities under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dogs that parked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even woke. It was the war that changed that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization - sleep was different everywhere ... — Timothy Findley

All of this happened a long time ago. But not so long ago that everyone who played a part in it is dead. Some can still be met in dark old rooms with nurses in attendance. — Timothy Findley

No one belongs to anyone. We're all cut off at birth with a knife and left at the mercy of strangers. You hear that? Strangers. I know what you want to do. I know you're going to go away to be a soldier. Well-you can go to hell. I'm not responsible. I'm just another stranger. Birth I can give you-but life I cannot. I can't keep anyone alive. Not anymore. — Timothy Findley

Me?" said Bragg. "I'm not alive. Revived, from time to time - maybe. but not alive."
Liar."
Try me."
You forget, Mister Bragg - Stu honey - Stuart darling - Bragg baby. I already have."
They had almost reached their destination.
Col said: "I don't have burn marks for nothing, my dear. I don't have these scars by chance. I'm covered with your fingerprints. Covered from head to toe and back again on the other side."
You sound just like Minna," said Bragg.
I know," Col said. "I know I do. I've been practising. — Timothy Findley

When Mrs Ross asked him what he was thinking of, he shrugged. But he was thinking of the time he'd climbed the steeple of a church when he was ten-and had seen, for the very first time, the world spread out around him like a gift. — Timothy Findley

Everyone who's born has come from the sea. Your mother's womb is just a sea in small. And birds come of seas on eggs. Horses lie in the sea before they're born. The placenta is the sea. Your blood is the sea continued in your veins. We are the ocean - walking on the land. — Timothy Findley

Elizabeth Hay has intelligence coming out of her fingertips - integrity, insight, and wonder in every paragraph of her writing.She connects. She stirs and provokes. — Timothy Findley

The mud. There are no good similes. Mud must be a Flemish word. Mud was invented here. Mudland must have been its name. The ground is the colour of steel. Over most of the plain there isn't a trace of topsoil; only sand and clay. The Belgians call them 'clyttes', these fields, and the further you go towards the sea, the worse the clyttes become. In them, the water is reached by the plough at an average depth of eighteen inches. When it rains (which is almost constantly from early September through to March, except when it snows) the water rises at you out of the ground. It rises from your footprints-and an army marching over a field can cause a flood. In 1916, it was said that you 'waded to the front'. Men and horses sank from sight. They drowned in mud. Their graves, it seemed, just dug themselves and pulled them down. — Timothy Findley

You will live when you live. No one else can ever live your life and no one else will ever know what you know ... — Timothy Findley

Nothing so completely verifies our perception of a thing as our killing of it. — Timothy Findley

Mrs Ross adjusted her veil but did not put the flask away ... 'Why is this happening to us, Davenport? What does it mean - to kill your children? Kill them and then go in there and sing about it! What does that mean?' She wept-but angrily. — Timothy Findley

... too much brooding, not enough doing. — Timothy Findley

There are no beginnings, not even to stories. There are only places where you make an entrance into someone else's life and either stay or turn and go away. — Timothy Findley

And what you do is you go into where your anger is, if you're writing anger, you go into where your hatred is, if you're writing hatred. Your joy is, if you're writing joy. You find the source of the energy that draws hatred, anger, joy, etc., etc., etc. That's what you have to find. That's what you do as an actor and that's what you do as a writer. And you bring people to the page. — Timothy Findley

Houses, trees and fields of flax once flourished here. Summers had been blue with flowers. Now it was a shallow sea of stinking grey from end to end. And this is where you fought the war. — Timothy Findley

I can't work in a house where there's saints. The minute there's saints, the devil sends messengers — Timothy Findley

I write against violence. I write against fascism. I write against one person dominating another. — Timothy Findley

They waited.
The door did not open.
The rain did not stop.
The darkness made a tent and covered them completely. — Timothy Findley

1915. The year itself looks sepia and soiled-muddied like its pictures. In the snapshots everyone at first seems timid-lost-irresolute. Boys and men squinting at the camera. — Timothy Findley

Rodwell wandered into No Man's Land and put a bullet through his ears. On Sunday, Robert sat on his bed in the old hotel at Bailleul and read what Rodwell had written.
To my daughter, Laurine;
Love your mother.
Make your prayers against despair.
I am alive in everything I touch. Touch these pages and you have me in your fingertips. We survive in one another. Everything lives forever. Believe it. Nothing dies.
I am your father always. — Timothy Findley

In the dark that followed - Lucy said; where I was born, the trees were always in the sun. And I left that place because it was intolerant of rain. Now, we are here in a place where there are no trees and there is only rain. And I intend to leave this place - because it is intolerant of light. Somewhere - there must be somewhere where darkness and light are reconciled. So I am starting a rumour, here and now, of yet another world. I don't know when it will present itself - I don't know where it will be. But - as with all those other worlds now past when it is ready, I intend to go there. — Timothy Findley

With Tom, there had never been a door to close, only the grass to lie on, never a bed; no walls, no ceiling to shut them in - or others out. Only the moon to see them, only the moon, some stars and whatever it was that had flown up out of the field when Ede had cried 'don't' in the final seconds of their embrace. Don't - meaning don't withdraw. — Timothy Findley

Think of any great man or woman. How can you separate them from the years in which they lived? You can't. Their greatness lies in their response to that moment. — Timothy Findley

Ede had been pregnant not quite the full term: eight months, two weeks, four days. She had lapsed into an extended silence - partly because she was still in mourning - still enraged and afraid of speech. And partly, too, because the child itself had taken up dreaming in her belly - dreaming and, Ede was certain, singing. Not singing songs a person knew, of course. Nothing Ede could recognize. But songs for certain. Music - with a tune to it. Evocative. A song about self. A song about place. As if a bird had sung it, sitting in a tree at the edge of a field. Or high in the air above a field. A hovering song. Of recognition. — Timothy Findley

The art of presenting oneself, he had once told Sybil, lies in creating an immediate shock which is countered by a slow retreat into custom. People never quite recover from my cravats, but they will never find the equal of my tailor. To be memorable is all, when it comes to dress. — Timothy Findley

Happiness is not our goal. The achievement of happiness deflects us from our true destiny which is the utter realization of self. — Timothy Findley

I tell you Charlie, I was there waiting in that field. waiting for Ede and Tom to find me. You don't think two people come together for nothing, do you? They were together because I was waiting to be found ... "
Then she looked straight into my face and said to me: "You know it, too, Charlie. All that time you waited for me to find you. What if I hadn't? What if I'd said: I won't?"
She turned, and clinging to my arm, she surveyed the fields of snow the stretched away to the confining wall. — Timothy Findley

As for the myths, take anyone's life and deny that most of it is deliberate self-delusion - an aggrandizement - a mixture of lies and truth, of what was wanted and what was had, producing the necessary justification for having been granted life in the first place. I was struck like a match, Lily wrote. I had no option but to burn.
You can put a period after that. Lily did. It was the story of her life. — Timothy Findley