Mavis Gallant
Mavis Gallant
Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant, CC, née Young, was a Canadian writer who spent much of her life and career in France. Best known as a short story writer, she also published novels, plays and essays...
camps full goes life loaded seldom
She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or who imagines life must be full of emergencies.
forever rest-of-your-life might
Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever.
art life-and-death sculpture
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?
interesting fascination life-is
All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.
writing matter way
I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.
girl patience dream
She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.
dream grief childhood
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.
writing garden house
A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.
dream father writing
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.
people half world
There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.
notebook writing way
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.
real sadness people
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.
memories appeals
... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.
father blessed blood
[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.