Every life is a tragedy, but far more the writer’s life, because the more he has to see, the more deeply he understands and feels about life, the less time he has to put it down.

My great hope would be that Quebec would realize itself fully as a distinct part of Canada, and stay Canadian, bringing to Canada a part of its richness.

Peace has been as bad as war. Peace has killed as many people as war. Peace is as bad. Peace is as bad.

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.

For a long time he stood at the window looking at the shining rails. They had always fascinated him. Squinting a little he saw them stretch away to infinity, carrying him off to his rediscovered youth.

Running anywhere, blindly, hating the echo of her footsteps in the silence of the empty streets, Florentine fled from her own fear, fled from herself.

Where could you find a light to guide the world?

Florentine had grown more or less immune to the charms of spring.

Her shoulders sagging, her back hunched, her eyelids tired, Rose-Anna sewed for the feast, not daring even to sing for fear of frightening off her joy.

It’s a funny life. Either you don’t make a red cent and you have all the time in the world, or else you get double the money and you don’t have a moment to spend a penny of it.

Because you’d be running after your own unhappiness.

Finally anger took possession of him. It was his turn to ask the question already raised by so many others: We, down there, the ones who join up, we’re giving everything we have to give, maybe our arms and our two legs. He looked up at the high grills, the curving driveways, the sumptuous facades, and completed his thought: Are these people giving all they have to give?

In every girl, there is a book waiting to be written.

To be an artist means never to avert your gaze, no matter how painful the truth might be.

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

I write to create a world where I am free to be myself, where I can explore the depths of my imagination.

The true beauty of life lies in its imperfections, in the scars and the wounds that make us human.

One knows less about one’s own destiny than about anything else on earth.

Of all things that can happen to us, triumph is the most difficult to endure when we are alone. Deprived of witnesses, it shrinks at once.

The main engagement of the writer is towards truthfulness; therefore he must keep his mind and his judgment free.

I felt the vulnerability, the fragility of the children of the world, and how it was, nonetheless, on their frail shoulders that we loaded the weight of our weary hopes and eternal new beginnings.

Curiosity ran unchecked through him, like the wind outside through the deserted streets, along the canal, around the little wooden houses, everywhere, as far as the mountain.

The more the heart is nourished with happiness, the more it is insatiable.

Poverty is like a pain, dormant and unbearable as long as you don’t move about too much. You grow used to it, you end up by paying no attention to it. But once you presume to bring it out in the daylight, it becomes terrifying, you see it at last in all its squalor and you shrink from exposing it to the sun.

Ideas often last but a day; feelings, dreams almost forever.

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

The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it.