"I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own."

"If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary."

"In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."

"The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies."

"Never pray for justice, because you might get some."

"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."

"The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love."

"A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason."

"The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose."

"Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself."

"Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one."

"A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together."

"Gardening is not a rational act."

"War is what happens when language fails."

"Canada was built on dead beavers."

"Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."

"The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'"

"For years I wanted to be older, and now I am."

"You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer."

"We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly."

"Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time."

"I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it."

"We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups."

"A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you."

"An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness."

"Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done."

"A word after a word after a word is power."