Gabrielle Roy Quotes

To make war, you had to be filled with love, with a vehement passion, exalted, intoxicated, otherwise the whole thing was inhuman and absurd.

He saw a tree in a backyard, its branches tortured among electric wires and clotheslines, its leaves dry and shriveled before they were fully out. Low in the sky, dark clouds heralded the storm.

...You and a lot of others like you wanted nothing more than a job and a bit of a salary just to keep the body and soul together. Instead of that you were doing, nothing and the rest of us who were making a dollar, well, we were paying for that. We paid to keep you doing nothing. In Canada, here, it got so the two-thirds of the population kept the other third idle!

She moved slowly, and her coat, too tight, made her belly stick out more prominently. With the two dollars deep in her purse she wandered off, more uncertain than ever, for now she saw the shining pans and pots and the cloth, so soft to the touch. Her desires grew vast and many, and she left, poorer certainly than when she had come in the store.

For a long time he stood at the window looking at the shining rails. They had always fascinated him. Squinting a little he saw them stretch away to infinity, carrying him off to his rediscovered youth.

Home! That was an old word, one of the first the children had ever learned. You used it without thinking, a hundred times a day. It had meant so many different things!..Home was an elastic word and even meaningless at times....

Her shoulders sagging, her back hunched, her eyelids tired, Rose-Anna sewed for the feast, not daring even to sing for fear of frightening off her joy.

Florentine was now no more than a bright patch on the platform. He managed to see her take out her compact and wipe away the few traces of her tears. He closed his eyes and, as if he were already very far away, cherished that image of Florentine and her powder puff. Then he searched the crowd one last time for her thin, small face and her burning eyes. But she had already turned her back to leave before the train was out of sight.

Florentine had grown more or less immune to the charms of spring.

He [Jean] still felt surges of generosity, and gave in to them if they didn’t cramp his style. That was it. He could be kind if kindness caused him no problems.

She too was standing in the lamp’s raw light. Her cheeks looked hollow, her lips too red, too bold.

That was when she recognized love: this torture on seeing someone, the greater torture when he was out of sight, in short, a torture without end.

We're saying that Germany wants to destroy us. And right now in Germany a whole lot of good quiet people like us, no worse than we are, they're getting whipped into a frenzy by the same story. They're being told the others are penning them into a country that's too small, and don't want to let them live. On one side or the other somebody's being sold a bill of goods. Maybe the Germans are wrong. We don't know. All I know is, I don't want to go killing some guy that never did me any harm, and who hasn't the choice but to do what he's told. I've got nothing against that poor guy. Why should I go and stick a bayonet into him? He wants to live, just like I do. He doesn't want to die.

She understood at once, and with the courageous goodwill that sustained her, resigned herself to the fact: there was always a drawback. There had to be. Sometimes it was the lack of light, or a factory nearby, or not enough rooms. Here, it was a railroad.

Rose-Anna was tugging at the edge of her apron with a tired, futile gesture she had never made in the past – the grandmother’s gesture.