Top 40 Ann-Marie MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Hope is a gift. You can’t choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

2. “Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

3. “In terms of the secrets that imbue and underlie Fall on Your Knees, they were as much of a mystery to me as I was creating the story as they are to the readers.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

4. “Lies like that are not a sin, they are a sacrifice.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

5. “Depression is anger slowed down; panic is grief speeded up.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

6. “Piece by piece living is hard to do. It may even feel like the hardest thing. But it has this going for it: you never need to know what it is you’re carrying on your shoulders.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

7. “The moon may drive men mad but it can calm a savage girl, for it is cool, precise, it is lucid.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

8. “Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

9. “It’s important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

10. “Books were not an expense; they were an investment.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

11. “There is love, there is music, there is no limit, there is work, there is the precious sense that this is the hour of grace when all things gather and distill to create the rest of my life. I don’t believe in God, I believe in everything.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

12. “You think you’re safe. Until you see a picture like that. And then you know you’ll always be a slave to the present because the present is more powerful than the past, no matter how long ago the present happened.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

13. “It’s not the cold that makes you sleep yourself to death in the Arctic, it’s the smooth pallor of the landscape, and the desert has that same smooth pallor, though Arabic. It’s the whiteness, the sameness of everything, that makes you fall asleep out of life, parched or frozen and so so comfortable when you finally let it roll over your mind, like a rolling-pin over dough.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

14. “The thief you must fear the most is not the one who steals mere things.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

15. “Dark and sweet, the elixir of love is in her mouth. The more I drink, the more I remember all the things we’ve never done. I was a ghost until I touched you. Never swallowed mortal food until I tasted you, never understood the spoken word until I found your tongue. I’ve been a sleepwalker, sad somnambula, hands outstretched to strike the solid thing that could awaken me to life at last. I have only ever stood here under this lamp, against your body, I’ve missed you all my life.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

16. “They are so young, they forget that the world is not as in love with them as they are.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

17. “Frances learns something in this moment that will allow her to survive and function for the rest of her life. She finds out that one thing can look like another. That the facts of a situation don’t necessarily indicate anything about the truth of a situation. In this moment, fact and truth become separated and commence to wander like twins in a fairy-tale, waiting to be reunited by that special someone who possesses the secret of telling them apart.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

18. “She wonders when it was that she began to despair. All these years she mistook it for pious resignation. Now she sees the difference. Such a fine line between a state of grace and a state of mortal sin. What is the good of believing fervently in God if you wind up hating Him?”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

19. “She is why purgatory was invented.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

20. “When stories are not told, we risk losing our way.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

21. “She’s no lady. Her songs are all unbelievably unhappy or lewd. It’s called Blues. She sings about sore feet, sexual relations, baked goods, killing your lover, being broke, men called Daddy, women who dress like men, working, praying for rain. Jail and trains. Whiskey and morphine. She tells stories between verses and everyone in the place shouts out how true it all is.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

22. “Frances is a sealed letter. It doesn’t matter where she’s been or who’s pawed her, no one gets to handle the contents no matter how grimy the envelope. And it’s for sure no one’s going to be able to steam her open.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

23. “Frances is a diamond, passed from filthy paw to paw but never diminished. The men who handle her can leave no mark because her worth is far above them. Hard, helpless, buried. You can hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes, she is waiting for a strong and fearless miner to go way down and rescue her up to the surface where she can shine for all she’s worth.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

24. “She is so beautiful. My Rose. Finer than sculpture, softer than sand. Rose, I’m kissing you now. Oh God, I have to kiss her. I will die if I don’t kiss her, I know that now. It is a fact. I will die. It will kill me.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

25. “Do you think there’s such a thing as a ghost who masquerades as a person? Do you believe that there are people whose bodies are still alive here on earth but whose souls are already in hell?”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

26. “An unhappily married woman is necessarily a bad cook.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

27. “She never knows when it might strike. The rage. And when it does, she loses her grip on herself – literally. At times, she could swear she sees another self – shiny black phantom, faceless, as though clad in a bodysuit – leaping out of her, pulling the rest of her in its wake. Over the edge.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

28. “Then she kissed me in that way that makes me hate time.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

29. “Materia had been just six when they docked in Sydney Harbour and her father said, ‘Look. This is the New World. Anything is possible here.’ She’s been too young to realize that he was talking to her brother.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

30. “It’s a sin for Lily to let Mercedes think it was Daddy who beat up Frances. But he has done it in the past. Surely truth can be borrowed across time without perishing. Shelf life, so to speak.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

31. “I thought I would get calmer, surer, but each time we come close I feel almost sick at first. As though each time vibrates with the times before. I feel a terrible sorrow coming up my throat, I don’t know why. And it can only be consoled against the length of her body. Lying down with her for the first time... all the pain I didn’t know I had, till at her touch it disappeared like smoke. Is this what purgatory feels like? To burn painlessly? If so, why isn’t it called heaven?”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

32. “Here is the place called Awake. On the other side of this line is the country of Asleep. And you see this shaded area in between? Don’t linger there. It is No Man’s Land.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

33. “Between a mother’s eyes and her son’s face, there is not air. There is something invisible and invincible. Even though – or because – he will go out into the world, she will never lose her passion to protect him.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

34. “There are some stories you can’t hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That’s one reliable way of understanding time.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

35. “To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

36. “But I have discovered something about modest people. They’re just waiting for the call. Then they are the first over the wall and into the temple.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

37. “Corruption hangs in the air around a great talent. Such a gift is unstable by nature, apt to embarrass its handlers. About her there is the whiff of the entertainer. Like vaudeville nipping the heels of grand opera. The maestro smells all this on Kathleen and cools his blood to a temperature undetectable by wild animals.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

38. “James could do all this because he had made a bargain with himself: he wouldn’t try to get killed, nor would he try to survive. He could do all this because he felt terribly sorry for the men he rescued. They harbored the saddest and most foolish desire of all. The desire to go on living.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

39. “It’s where she belongs, she craves the caress of the violent shore, to come alive like that once more in a clash of stone and then to die.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

40. “As for sin. I honestly can’t believe God is so bored or so lecherous as to care how close my body and its various parts get to someone else’s various parts.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

41. “The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

42. “When will she discover that I am from a lesser race of immortals? But the high deities have always needed pixies to persuade them down to earth. When she no longer needs an intermediary, will she still love me?”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

43. “You always run into something no matter where you go. Turns out you’re someplace after all.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

44. “They are all dead now.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

45. “Fresh sorrows reactivate old ones. We go to the same well to grieve, and it’s fuller every time.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

46. “It’s because a real and beautiful voice delicately rends the chest, discovered the heart, and holds it beating against a stainless edge until you long to be pierced utterly. For the voice is everything you do not remember. Everything you should not be able to live without and yet, tragically, do.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

47. “Be strong enough to carry the burden of sin that goes with doing the right thing.”

— Ann-Marie MacDonald