Margo Lanagan Quotes

“Seals do not sit about and tell, the way people do, and their lives are not eventful in the way people's are, lines of story combed again and again, in the hope that they will yield more sense with every stroke.”

“Why must we climb away to the seal-less parts of the world?”

“That doesn't sound like my Margo", she said, and I thought of my Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different funhouse mirrors.”

“Remember the great film with Bette Davis, All About Eve? There's a scene after the scheming Eve steals Margo's role through trickery & then gets this magnificent review. Margo of course is effing & blinding all over the place. And crying. Her director rushes into her house, puts his arms around her & says, "I ran all the way". That's what I want.”

“Noir is a court of human relations, and some crimes are beyond legal restitution.”

“I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.”

“What's often not acknowledged about depression is how much anger is in it.”

“Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.”

“As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back to him again and again. I do go back to Emily Dickinson again and again.”

“New York, for decades, offered a perpetual series of 'golden ages' to artists. You constantly had to measure yourself against the best, and you had to watch them, which meant that your imagination and also your sense of what the market could stand got very, very sharp.”