Emily Carr Quotes

Where be I? – Mercy! I came for a pup! That’s where I be. ‘Usband says when we was changin’ shifts walkin’ son last night. ‘Try a pup, Mother’ ‘e sez- ‘We’ve tried rattles an’ bells an’ tyos. Try a live pup to soothe ‘is frettiness.’ So I come. ‘Usband sez, ‘Git a pup same age as son’ – Sooner ‘ave one ‘ouse-broke me’self – wot yer got?”
“I have pups three months old”
‘Ezzact same age as son! Bring ‘em along.”
She inspected the puppy, running an experienced finger round her gums.
“Toothed a’ready! ‘E’ll do.”
She tucked the pup into the pram beside the baby who immediately seized the dog’s ear and began to chew. The pup as immediately applied himself greedily to the baby’s bottle and began to suck.

What do these forests make you feel? Their weight and density, their crowded orderliness. There is scarcely room for another tree and yet there is space around each. They are profoundly solemn yet upliftingly joyous; like the Bible, you can find strength in them that you look for. How absolutely full of truth they are, how full of reality. The juice and essence of life are in them; they teem with life, growth and expansion. They are a refuge for myriads of living things. As the breezes blow among them, they quiver, yet how still they stand developing with the universe. God is among them. He has breathed with them the breath of life, might and patience. They stand developing, springing from tiny seeds, pushing close to Mother Earth. Fluffy baby things first, sheltering beneath their parents, mounting higher, spreading brave braches, pushing with mighty strength not to be denied skywards. Tossing in the breezes, glowing in the sunshine, bathing in the showers, bending below the snow piled on their branches, drinking the dew, rejoicing in creation, bracing each other, sheltering the birds and beasts, the myriad insects.

I wonder will death be much lonelier than life. Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You can live close against other people yet your lives never touch. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even coming and going.

Indians do not hinder the progress of their dead by embalming or tight coffining. When the spirit has gone they give the body back to the earth. the earth welcomes the body-coaxes new life and beauty from it, hurries over what men shudder at. Lovely tender herbage bursts from the graves, swiftly, exulting over corruption.

Why must these people go on, and on, copying, copying fragments of old relics from extinct churches, and old tombs as though those were the best that could ever be, and it would be a sacrilege to beat them? Why didn't they want to out-do the best, instead of copying, always copying what had been done?

If you're going to lick the icing off somebody else's cake you won't be nourished and it won't do you any good, or you might find the cake had caraway seeds and you hate them.

The old man sawed as if aeons of time were before him, and as if all the years behind him had been leisurely and all the years in front of him would be equally so. Life had sweetened the old man. He was luscious with time like the end berries of the strawberry season.

Vancouver city was more beautiful to look at across the water than to be in.

In the early morning the dogs burst from their sleeping quarters to bunch by the garden gate, panting for a race across Beacon Hill Park. Springs that wound themselves tighter and tighter in their bodies all night would loose with a whir on the opening of the garden gate. Ravenous for liberty, the dogs tore across the ball grounds at the base of Beacon Hill, slackened their speed to tag each other, wheeled back, waiting to climb the hill with me.

For one moment the morning took you far out into vague chill, but your body snatched you back into its cosiness, back to the waiting dogs on the hill top. They could not follow out there, their world was walled, their noses trailed the earth. What a dog cannot hear or smell he distrusts; unless objects are close or move he does not observe them. His nature is to confirm what he sees by his sense of sound or of smell.

Punk!”

Slowly the tired eyes turned from watching the street corner and looked at me without interest.

“He will follow no one but his master,” said the woman.

The dog suffered my hand on his collar; he rose and shambled disheartenedly at my side, carrying the only luggage he possessed – his name and a broken heart.

It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw.

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

More than ever was I convinced that the old way of seeing was inadequate to express this big country of ours, her depth, her height, her unbounded wildness, silences too strong to be broken - nor could ten million cameras, through their mechanical boxes, ever show real Canada. It had to be sensed, passed through live minds, sensed and loved.

Bobtails,” murmured the butcher caressingly – “Bobtails is good dogs!... ‘Member the little ‘un I bought from your kennel a year back?”

“I do. Hope she turned out well – good worker?

“Good worker! You bet. More sick nurse than cattle driver. Our Min’s fine! Y’see, Missus be bed-fast. Market days she’d lay there, sunup to sundown, alone. I got Min; then she wasn’t alone no more; Min told hold. Market days Min guards sheep from cougars, Min shoos coon from hen-house – Min, Min, Min. Min runs the whole works, Min do!