Top 15 Gabrielle Roy Quotes

The more the heart is sated with joy, the more it becomes insatiable.

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.

He seemed to be witnessing with his own eyes the supreme bankruptcy of humanity. Wealth had spoken the truth that night on the mountain.

Azarius, for his part, had not made her voyage to the depths of pain to understand that death and birth, in that place, have almost the same tragic meaning.

"Don’t preach," said Florentine violently. She was beginning to see the maze of lies and deceptions that lay before her.

This is my wedding day! The day I marry Emmanuel! And the word "wedding," which she had always linked the happiness, now seemed austere, distressing, full of snares and revelations. She saw her mother, heavy and moving with difficulty. A vision of herself as a victim of the same deformity was vivid in her mind.

Why did she have to wake up this morning? Or ever! But especially this morning. Her stare took on a glint of panic. Then she thought: Oh! This is my wedding day!

They could see the rapids on their right. The swaying of the bus made her sick and weak, and her willpower was failing with her strength. She was afraid of falling into a torpor in which everything would become immaterial to her, and she tensed in an effort to seem gay and even attentive to Emmanuel.

Where could you find a light to guide the world?

Finally anger took possession of him. It was his turn to ask the question already raised by so many others: We, down there, the ones who join up, we're giving everything we have to give, maybe our arms and our two legs. He looked up at the high grills, the curving driveways, the sumptuous facades, and completed his thought: Are these people giving all they have to give?

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

Peace has been as bad as war. Peace has killed as many people as war. Peace is as bad. Peace is as bad...

Every moment of every day and night he was able to take the measure of his failure now. Even his family's poverty which for years he had refused to admit, began to grow familiar to him, but like the memory of a companion that one has left behind. Rose-Anna...She'd been a young girl at his side, then tired, then overwhelmed, and here she was sleeping beside him on a kind of pallet, on the floor. He could hear the whimpers from the children in their sleep.

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.

Why, this man seemed barely older than himself, Emmanuel thought. He gave off a sense of almost irresistible vigor. Quite simply, he had at last become a man...