Marsh King's Daughter Quotes

Memories aren't always about facts. Sometimes they're about feelings.

Memories can be tricky, especially those from childhood.

And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, “No Drunk Natives.” Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the Lethbridge Herald to voice their outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke. Now, I’ll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It’s just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not. Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter’s generation. And let’s not forget some of our politicians and persons of power who control the fates of nations: Winston Churchill, John A. Macdonald, Boris Yeltsin, George Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hard drinkers, every one. The somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks. They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the ex-premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star Lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others. More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.

neither does the seed in the lap of earth know, when the refreshing dew and the warm sunbeams fall upon it, that it contains within itself power by which it will flourish and bloom.

There's a stigma to being the offspring of a kidnapper, rapist, and murderer that's hard to shake. If people think I'm exaggerating, they should think about this: Would they have welcomed me into their home knowing who my father was and what he did to my mother? Let me be friends with their sons and daughters? Trusted me to babysit their children? Even if someone says yes to any of these, I'll bet they hesitated before they did.

Until my mother's abduction, the children of Luce County weren't kept under lock and key. Possibly not even after, because old habits die hard, and because no one ever really things that bad things are going to happen to them. Especially after they've already happened to somebody else.

The thing people have to understand about wild strawberries is that the berries are nothing like the California behemoths they buy in grocery stores. Not much bigger than the tip of an adult's little finger on average, but with a flavor that more than makes up for their tiny size.

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It came to him that life moved in circles like the ripples radiating from a stone cast into a pool. . . Now he was on the outer ring of the last ripple, journeying to fulfill the cycle. Or perhaps the cycle was already complete and he was about to cast another stone.

I know the difference between the confection of live as sung in a minstrel's tale and the sustaining bread of love in reality, he defended himself. Both are to be savoured in their own way.

Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will the white man realize he cannot eat money” was one of my father’s favorite sayings. “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne until

In the U.P., hunting is practically a religion.

But you have to accept responsibility for your decisions, even when they don’t work out the way you wanted.

This is not Stockholm syndrome; psychologists call it learned helplessness.

Sometimes the greatest monsters lie within the ones we love.

Survival is not just about physical strength, but also the strength of your mind and spirit.

The past has a way of seeping into the present, staining everything it touches.

We are all products of our upbringing, but we have the power to choose who we become.

There is a darkness in all of us, but it's how we handle it that defines us.

Sometimes the best revenge is living a life filled with love and happiness.

Forgiveness is a powerful tool, but some scars run too deep to ever fully heal.

We are defined by our choices, not our circumstances.

In the midst of darkness, the light of hope will always find its way.

The past may shape us, but it is the present that defines our future.

The heart has a way of healing, even when the scars remain.

Raccoons have an almost uncanny ability to time their nighttime raids to when the ears are a day or two away from being ripe, and there’s not a fence in the world that can keep them out.

And what is truth, since it changes according to each individual's perception?

Sometimes love strikes like lightning, and its power is as blinding. Other times it comes gently, creeps up on you unawares and covers you like a blanket.

Ihad no idea when I was growing up that there was anything wrong with my family. Children usually don’t. Whatever their situation, that’s what’s normal to them. Daughters of abusers fall in with abusive men as adults because that’s what they’re used to. It feels familiar. Natural. Even if they don’t like the circumstances in which they were brought up.

Sometimes a person thinks she wants something, but then after she gets it, she finds out it wasn’t what she wanted at all.

What one person must do another one can’t.

But my affections weren’t divided; they were multiplied.