Mavis Gallant Dream Quotations

She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express.

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.