Quotes About Lanagan

#1. I had know it and never known it.

Margo Lanagan

#2. Home is home, no? - whatever layabouts you live with, whatever tempers and timidities. I was glad to glimpse them, and glad to go to my own bed among them, with the right smell and the right hollows holding me ...

Margo Lanagan

#3. These words came, quite clear, like small, evil people, across the cobbles to Branza's ankles, where they stood and smirked up at her.

Margo Lanagan

#4. Life is so long, and too hard, and then it ends so cruel and sudden!

Margo Lanagan

#5. As if the world were a pot on the boil and someone had taken its lid off and let the steam pour up wildly.

Margo Lanagan

#6. It was one thing not to want a husband, I realized; it was quite another not to need one for the roof over your head, for your meat and bread, for the shoes on your feet and the coat on your back.

Margo Lanagan

#7. And then she fell, from standing, foot-fins together, straight into the wavelets, where she was now seal, and she flung herself down toward the deeper water.

Margo Lanagan

#8. But how could they be tormenters if Branza refused to be tormented by them?

Margo Lanagan

#9. It is only, she thought, that I thought you brought my bear, and life lit up for a moment. And now it is returned to its usual dimness, which truly I had thought was bright enough for me.

Margo Lanagan

#10. I may not be happy," she said, "but I will be.

Margo Lanagan

#11. Seals do not sit about and tell, the way people do, and their lives are not eventful in the way people's are, lines of story combed again and again, in the hope that they will yield more sense with every stroke.

Margo Lanagan

#12. The scents of these three, for instance, were so distinct, though they were clearly a family: the dark girl more savory and the golden-haired one more honeylike and they woman sweetest of all- I could not place what flower it was she recalled to me, or what sweetmeat.

Margo Lanagan

#13. The earth's lungs, coated in green ooze and thaw, breathed out blossom-scent and sour rot and fungus-must, wet and warm and aware, where before the air had been cold and blind, remote as the moon.

Margo Lanagan

#14. With her heels kicking the stone's side high above the ground, Branza was a girl again, though she was full-grown long ago; though the years had accumulated behind her in their great pointless pile.

Margo Lanagan

#15. My mum was a librarian, and she brought home a lot of interesting books, and we just read and read. I suppose I didn't really think I could be a writer myself until I was working in editing in my 20s and discovered that actually, the books that came in were not very much like published books.

Margo Lanagan

#16. Her parents didn't understand that braille meant big clunky books that marked you as different, while audiobooks live invisibly on your phone and text-to-speech gave you the whole damn internet.

Scott Westerfeld

#17. You are pure-hearted and lovely, and you have never done a moment's wrong. But you are a living creature, born to make a real life, however it cracks your heart.

Margo Lanagan

#18. She had a different kind of boldness, a strength that did not defy that of men so much as ignore it, or take its place without question beside it - Urdda wanted some of that boldness.

Margo Lanagan

#19. How sweet it was to be scolded by such a tiny.

Margo Lanagan

#20. Nothing in my tale seemed to surprised the woman. The cat, on the other hand, seemed not to find a word of it credible.

Margo Lanagan

#21. Why must we climb away to the seal-less parts of the world?

Margo Lanagan

#22. It's useful to think of the imagination as an aspect of the body because it seems to have processes of its own that are obscure to us.

Margo Lanagan

#23. How different other families were, the shape of them, the things they presumed, the children that grew up in them.

Margo Lanagan

#24. Her heart's too hurt ... you frightened her. And she's such a straight lady
she sees shame where some of us just see people.

Margo Lanagan

#25. What about the world do you most love?
The fact that I'm not here by myself.
-from interview by Jeff Vandermeer in Clarkesworld magazine

Margo Lanagan

#26. I'm a very promiscuous reader. My dad's a big science fiction fan, so I'd read 'Dune,' and 'Watership Down' and 'The Lord Of The Rings.'

Margo Lanagan

#27. You must watch and wait, Branza, to see what powers you have and don't have. It is not like home. We ruled there. Everything fell into place around what we wanted. Here, we are not the only ones wanting, and we must make room for other people's desires.

Margo Lanagan

#28. There's this assumption that all children have the luxury of a childhood where their innocence is always respected and their main occupation is pleasant play - at the age of 18 or 21, they are then thrust into the real world and shown its uglier side, but not before.

Margo Lanagan

#29. How on earth do people imagine we equip children for life if we never show them the sorts of issues other people encounter, if we never talk through with them how they might deal with difficulty or violence or unexpected shocks and surprises?

Margo Lanagan

#30. I do occasionally get into that 'checking Twitter every five minutes' state - 'Please, help me avoid my work.' I have a writing room for when I get completely out of control, so I can put myself out of the Internet's reach.

Margo Lanagan

#31. How could a person be clumsy, just standing? And yet she felt she was, as clumsy as one of those blocks of boxwood being seasoned there, unshaped, indelicate.

Margo Lanagan