Memoirists From Canada

"... poor had no terror for me! It was pie for me! My whole life had been a fight!"

"Love is not getting, but giving. It is sacrifice. And sacrifice is glorious! I have no patience with women who measure and weigh their love like a country doctor dispensing capsules. If a man is worth loving at all, he is worth loving generously, even recklessly."

"Fate cast me to play the role of an ugly duckling with no promise of swanning. Therefore, I sat down when a mere child—fully realizing just how utterly "mere" I was—and figured out my life early. Most people do it, but they do it too late. At any rate, from the beginning I have played my life as a comedy rather than the tragedy many would have made of it."

"There is a vast difference between success at twenty-five and success at sixty. At sixty, nobody envies you. Instead, everybody rejoices generously, sincerely, in your good fortune."

"I was born serious and I have earned my bread making other people laugh."

"It is well enough to be interested in one's profession, but to restrict one's leisure to association with the members of one's guild, so to speak, is to be doomed to artificiality and eventually to sterility. In order to represent life on the stage, we must rub elbows with life, live ourselves."

"A rut is like a grave – it's only a question of depth."

"If ants are such busy workers, how come they find time to go to all the picnics?"

"By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves."

"I wanted to be at the apex of my story…For a long time, it felt as though things were happening to me. I felt as though I had no agency."

"I think people have to hit rock bottom to really know their faculties because they have to use those faculties to get out of that rock bottom. I really had to feel profoundly lonely to get myself out of the feeling of being profoundly lonely. But it was always there, that feeling of loneliness and existing with the absence of something that had been stripped from me."

"Women, not all, but many, like seeing they aren’t alone. My story is very common. I was abused. Mistreated. Hurt by men. I came up. Women resonate with that story because it’s theirs sometimes."

"Turning those revelations into art was a whole other thing…I did it, though — and that helped me realize my power, beyond the pain. Being able to illustrate those experiences for readers was a triumph, because it took everything to resist all the urges I have as a human being to present myself as good, or healed, or undamaged. I had to work against myself to make the memoir, and I ended up more empowered than I ever thought I could be."

"Your capable beggar on the street does not say "please." He rips off his spiel in such exact and precise language that he gets your dime without it. You so admire his "art" that you do not miss the "please" because he knows you do not use it except when you want the mustard."

"To say I was shocked, stunned, or humiliated on entering the penitentiary would not be the truth. It would not be true in nine cases out of any ten. It would be true if a man were picked up on the street and taken directly to a penitentiary, but that isn't done He is first thrown into a dirty, lousy, foul-smelling cell in some city prison, sometimes with an awful beating in the bargain, and after two or three days of that nothing in the world can chock, stun, or humiliate him. He is actually happy to get removed to a county jail where he can perhaps get rid of the vermin and wash his body. By that time, convicted, and sentenced, he has learned from other prisoners just what the penitentiary is like and just what to do and what to expect. You start doing time the minute the handcuffs are on your wrists. The first day you are locked up is the hardest, and the last day the easiest. There comes a feeling of helplessness when the prison gates wallow you up - cut you off from the sunshine and flowers out in the world - but that feeling soon wears away if you have guts. Some men despair. I am sure I did not."

"He returned to New York and Fremont thought Jack did what he always said any down-and-outer should do, "fill his pockets with rocks and take a header into the bay."

"I fell in with a wolfish-eyed girl of the streets, hungry and shivering in a doorway, so shabby that men would not throw an appraising glance at her. Like Julia she was almost “ready for the river.”"

"You Can't Win is (...) an autobiography of a reformed criminal. It points a sufficiently obvious moral, yet one that too many at the present day are prone to forget. A deeper question is also raised, and that is regarding the validity of the practical aims and ideals of the majority of people in our modern world."

"Jamboree author Black is a graduate of five penitentiaries, was pried loose from a 25-year prison term and helped to overcome his addiction to narcotics by mustachioed Editor Fremont Older of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin. This play is a dramatization of Black's book You Can't Win. "Every character in this play is drawn from the personal experiences of Jack Black during his years as a criminal or as a prisoner. The types are real and these people actually lived."

"Jack had been a sort of a reign of terror...just before the earthquake and fire of 1906. Every crime committed in San Francisco during the first three months of that year was ascribed to Jack Black."

"He introduced me as being the new Ann Darrow, and she looked up at me and she went, 'You're not Ann Darrow, I am!'" Watts says. "I thought, 'Oh great, she's 96 and her humor is still right there.' Then I had a moment of, "Oh God, what if she doesn't like me? What if she doesn't think I'm good enough?" -- and all that typical stuff. Anyway, we had a nice dinner and chitchatted, and at the end of the night, we dropped her home at her house, and she got out of the car. We all kissed and hugged, and she whispered in my ear "Ann Darrow is in good hands." Those were great parting words, because it felt like she was giving me permission and I was given the baton."

"She was very attentive, and I think he was very moved by the experience of actually being in the same room with her. In fact, I think I saw a tear well up. It was a lovely moment."

"King Kong was difficult only because of the hours we had to put in. At that time, there was no protection for actors about time or anything. We worked straight through for 22 hours once on Kong. It was really a wearying experience, because it was mechanics, really, as much as anything that we were dealing with. The technicality was transparency to transparency from the rear, and then re-photographing me in the foreground on the same level with that screen-so I couldn't really see what was happening at all! It had to be done many, many times to confirm that it was okay. So we worked for 22 hours!"

"She as a wonderful mother. She was whimsical, smart, caring, loving, playful. If I had any fault with her as a mother, it’s that she never criticized her children. She was very, very caring and supportive. You might say to a fault. There were times when I thought I shouldn’t get away with that. We often think of film stars as these iconic figures who we see on the screen, but behind the scenes, there’s a family, there are relationships, and she managed life. She came from what I call pioneer stock. She was born in Canada, but really from a pioneer Mormon family. Then they left the Mormon family, but that pioneer’s strengths saw her through quite a bit. The more I think about her, and reflect on her and try to write about her, I realize what a resilient person she was, but she was resilient with kindness and warmth and humor, which is not to say her life was easy. I think it’s good for people to know about the difficulties she faced because I think we all face difficulties and work our way through and she’s a good role model in that sense."

"They did not talk or want to talk. It was as if they were afraid to talk for fear of spoiling something beautiful. But Anne had never felt so near Katherine Brooke before. By some magic of its own the winter night had brought them together . . . almost together but not quite."

"I wended my way to the graveyard this evening," wrote Anne to Gilbert after she got home. "I think 'wend your way' is a lovely phrase and I work it in whenever I can. It sounds funny to say I enjoyed my stroll in the graveyard but I really did. Miss Courtaloe's stories were so funny. Comedy and tragedy are so mixed up in life, Gilbert. The only thing that haunts me is that tale of the two who lived together fifty years and hated each other all that time. I can't believe they really did. Somebody has said that 'hate is only love that has missed its way.' I feel sure that under the hatred they really loved each other . . . just as I really loved you all those years I thought I hated you . . . and I think death would show it to them."

"I remembered Elizabeth had never laughed once during our talk. I feel that she hasn't learned how. The great house is so still and lonely and laughterless. It looks dull and gloomy even now when the world is a riot of autumn color. Little Elizabeth is doing too much listening to lost whispers."

"Be the day short or be the day long, at last it weareth to evening song."

"I like wind," he said. "A day when there is no wind seems to me dead. A windy day wakes me up." He gave a conscious laugh. "On a calm day I fall into day dreams. No doubt you know my reputation, Miss West. If I cut you dead the next time we meet don't put it down to bad manners. Please understand that it is only abstraction and forgive me—and speak to me."

"It is never quite safe to think we have done with life. When we imagine we have finished our story fate has a trick of turning the page and showing us yet another chapter."

"We miss so much out of life if we don't love. The more we love the richer life is—even if it is only some little furry or feathery pet."

"Life had taught her to be brave, to be patient, to love, to forgive."

"And Gilbert was dying!"

"Anne, do you know, I believe I shall always love you after this. I don't think I'll ever feel that dreadful way about you again. Talking it all out seems to have done away with it, somehow. It's very strange—and I have thought it so real and bitter. It's like opening the door of a dark room to show some hideous creature you've believed to be there—and when the light steams in your monster turns out to have been just a shadow, vanishing when the light comes. It will never come between us again."

"Her confusion put him at ease and he forgot to be shy; besides, even the shyest of men can sometimes be quite audacious in moonlight."

"We stood there and talked while Elizabeth sipped her milk daintily and she told me all about Tomorrow. The Woman had told her that Tomorrow never comes, but Elizabeth knows better. It will come sometime. Some beautiful morning she will just wake up and find it is Tomorrow. Not Today but Tomorrow. And then things will happen . . . wonderful things. She may even have a day to do exactly as she likes in, with nobody watching her . . . though I think Elizabeth feels that is too good to happen even in Tomorrow. Or she may find out what is at the end of the harbor road . . . that wandering, twisting road like a nice red snake, that leads, so Elizabeth thinks, to the end of the world. Perhaps the Island of Happiness is there. Elizabeth feels sure there is an Island of Happiness somewhere where all the ships that never come back are anchored, and she will find it when Tomorrow comes."

"What a comfort one familiar face is in a howling wilderness of strangers!"

"A slender shapely young aspen rose up before them against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky, which brought out every leaf and twig in dark, tremulous, elfin loveliness."

"Gilbert was friendly—very friendly—far too friendly....But Anne no longer found it satisfying. The rose of love made the blossom of friendship pale and scentless by contrast."

"I wouldn't give up altogether," said Mr. Harrison reflectively. "I'd write a story once in a while, but I wouldn't pester editors with it. I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne—I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men in the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them—though Mrs. Lynde believes we're all bad. But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us."

"But feeling is so different from knowing. My common sense tells me all you can say, but there are times when common sense has no power over me. Common nonsense takes possession of my soul."

"But she lay long awake that night, nor did she wish for sleep. Her waking fancies were more alluring than any vision of dreamland. Had the real Prince come at last? Recalling those glorious dark eyes which had gazed so deeply into her own, Anne was very strongly inclined to think he had."

"She found, however, that revenge hurts nobody quite so much as the one who tries to inflict it."

""Why did you kill Maurice Lennox?" she asked reproachfully."

"Oh ye! who all life's energies combine The fadeless laurel round your brows to twine, Pause but one moment in your brief career, Nor seek for glory in a mortal sphere."

"But now I salute you who follow me, It is my time to stand at ease ... content."

"I was not going to go to bed forever with his unwarranted death on my conscience."

"No one's reputation is quite what he himself perceives it ought to be."

"Command is often not what you do but the way you do it."

"My recollection is that most of the crap coming out of the trial via the media had Meyer condemned even before the trial was over."