Kathleen Winter Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. ... 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.

Kathleen Winter

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Everyone was trying to define everything so carefully, Jacinta felt; they wanted to annihilate all questions.

Kathleen Winter

#14. 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

#15. Point of view is everything.

Kathleen Winter

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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