Gabrielle Roy Quotes

On the windowpanes came rattling fistfuls of shot, and the snow whirled and sifted beneath ill-fitting doors, slid in the cracks of windowsills and searched in a frenzy for any refuge against the fury of the wind.

Because you’d be running after your own unhappiness.

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.

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.

The sun was already a bright, running brook. From the gables of the houses hung sharp-pointed icicles, like gleaming crystal. From time to time one would break off with a snap, and crash at Rose-Anne's feet in shining shards. She progressed very slowly, afraid of falling, always seeking a hand-hold somewhere. Then she would be in soft snow again, which meant harder work but less fear of a slip and fall.

But Florentine was still riding the crest of her great wave...When it lifted her high she had to hold her breath. How could she ever again be bothered by these petty everyday cares? Would she ever again feel the old anxiety on hearing these dreadful midnight confidences, in the silence heavy with breathing? The wave that bore her was like a long, slow swell. There were hollows into which she sank with all her thoughts, all her willpower, where she was no more than a wing, a feather, a fringe, borne off ever faster, ever faster...He kissed me on the cheeks. On the eyes! "What's going to happen to us, Florentine? If your father's gone and lost his job again, we'll have to live on what you can give us, poor Florentine. We can always go back on relief...

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

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.

Florentine... Florentine Lacasse... half song, half squalor, half springtime, half misery,the young man murmured.

Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?