Crow Lake
Mary Lawson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“You see the suffering of children all the time nowadays. Wars and famines are played out before us in our living rooms, and almost every week there are pictures of children who have been through unimaginable loss and horror. Mostly they look very calm. You see them looking into the camera, directly at the lens, and knowing what they have been through you expect to see terror or grief in their eyes, yet so often there’s no visible emotion at all. They look so blank it would be easy to imagine that they weren’t feeling much. And though I do not for a moment equate what I went through with the suffering of those children, I do remember feeling as they look. I remember Matt talking to me--- others as well, but mostly Matt--- and I remember the enormous effort required even to hear what he said. I was so swamped by unmanageable emotions that I couldn’t feel a thing. It was like being at the bottom of the sea.”
“We are all bumbling along,side by side, week in, week out, our paths similar in some ways and different in others, all apparently running parallel. But parallel lines never meet.”
“Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all”
“The lake hadn’t been frozen long and of all them had been expressly forbidden to go out on it, but Norman Pye, who was older than the rest of them, said that it would be safe if they slid out on their bellies. So they did. “We thought it was exciting as all get out,” Miss Vernon said. “We could hear the ice cracking but it didn’t give, and we slid across it like seals. Oh, it was tremendous fun. The ice was clear as glass and you could see right to the bottom. All the stones lying there, brighter and more colourful than they ever are when you look through the water. You could even see fish swimming about. And then all at once there was this loud crack and the whole sheet gave way, and there we were in the water.”
“Laurie was just one more dropped stitch in a family tapestry already full of holes.”
“That last stretch of the journey from Toronto to Crow Lake always takes me by the throat. Partly it's the familiarity; I know every tree, every rock, every boggy bit of marshland so well, that even though I almost always arrive after dark I can feel them around me, lying there in the darkness as if they were my own bones.”
“Most children suffer from a crippling lack of stimulation. The brain is like any other muscle; use it, and it develops. Ignore it, and it atrophies.”
“I would like to be able to say that I threw myself into the spirit of it all, but the truth is, I still felt a bit dazed. A bit abstracted. It's going to take time, I guess. If you’ve thought in a certain way for many years, if you’ve had a picture in your mind of how things are and that picture is suddenly shown to be faulty, well, it stands to reason that it will take a while to adjust. And during that time, you’re bound to feel … disconnected”
“Matt had told me that cold was just the absence of heat, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like a presence. It felt stealthy, like a thief. You had to wrap your clothes tight around you or it would steal your warmth, and when all your warmth was gone you’d just be a shell, empty and brittle as a dead beetle.”
“children have very little concept of time. Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all.”
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Book Keywords:
lakes, emotional-development, childhood-suffering, time, northern-ontario, ice
