Best 9 quotes of Marian Engel on MyQuotes

All intellectual missionaries tend to lechery.

Happiness is a fragile thing, and alcohol, as I know from the house I grew up in, is dangerous to it.

I have tried and failed to lead a conventional life. When I try to be like other people, I fall out of bed.

Remember that it is not enough to have everything around you beautiful, remember that there must also be change and flux, because it is through change that we pretend that we can make decisions, and keep our pride, and go on pretending that both change and choice exist.

There is a difference between art and life and that difference is readability.

There's a kind of virgin one only becomes with difficulty.

Because what she disliked in men was not their eroticism, but their assumption that women had none. Which left women with nothing to be but housemaids.

the image of the Good Life long ago stamped on her soul was quite different from this, and she suffered in contrast.

Where have I been? she wondered. Is a life that can now be considered an absence a life? For some time things had been going badly for her. She could cite nothing in particular as a problem; rather, it was as if life in general had a grudge against her. Things persisted in turning grey. Although at first she had revelled in the erudite seclusion of her job, in the protection against the vulgarities of the world that it offered, after five years she now felt that in some way it had aged her disproportionately, that she was as old as the yellowed papers she spent her days unfolding. When, very occasionally, she raised her eyes from the past and surveyed the present, it faded from her view and became as ungraspable as a mirage. Although she had discussed this with the Director, who had waved away her condition of mind as an occupational hazard, she was still not satisfied that this was how the only life she had been offered should be lived.