Gabrielle Roy - The Tin Flute (1945)

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Florentine... Florentine Lacasse... half song, half squalor, half springtime, half misery, the young man murmured.

Gabrielle Roy
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.

Gabrielle Roy
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?

Gabrielle Roy
Because you'd be running after your own unhappiness.

Gabrielle Roy
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.

Gabrielle Roy
She moved slowly, and her coat, too tight, made her belly stick out more prominently. With the two dollars deep in her purse she wandered off, more uncertain than ever, for now she saw the shining pans and pots and the cloth, so soft to the touch. Her desires grew vast and many, and she left, poorer certainly than when she had come in the store.

Gabrielle Roy
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.

Gabrielle Roy
She understood at once, and with the courageous goodwill that sustained her, resigned herself to the fact: there was always a drawback. There had to be. Sometimes it was the lack of light, or a factory nearby, or not enough rooms. Here, it was a railroad.

Gabrielle Roy
This is my wedding day! The day I marry Emmanuel! And the word "wedding," which she had always linked the happiness, now seemed austere, distressing, full of snares and revelations. She saw her mother, heavy and moving with difficulty. A vision of herself as a victim of the same deformity was vivid in her mind.

Gabrielle Roy
She too was standing in the lamp's raw light. Her cheeks looked hollow, her lips too red, too bold.

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

Gabrielle Roy
It began to rain harder. The last snow was under attack by these heavy, wide-spaced drops. All that remained underfoot of months of frost and freezing was a light crust that crumbled as he walked. The sidewalk was soon completely washed by this slow, tenacious rain. Its smooth, shining surface reflected the midnight lights and tangles of naked branches.

Gabrielle Roy
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.

Gabrielle Roy
You and a lot of others like you wanted nothing more than a job and a bit of a salary just to keep the body and soul together. Instead of that you were doing, nothing and the rest of us who were making a dollar, well, we were paying for that. We paid to keep you doing nothing. In Canada, here, it got so the two-thirds of the population kept the other third idle!

Gabrielle Roy
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.

Gabrielle Roy
Home! That was an old word, one of the first the children had ever learned. You used it without thinking, a hundred times a day. It had meant so many different things!..Home was an elastic word and even meaningless at times....

Gabrielle Roy
To make war, you had to be filled with love, with a vehement passion, exalted, intoxicated, otherwise the whole thing was inhuman and absurd.

Gabrielle Roy
He [Jean] still felt surges of generosity, and gave in to them if they didn't cramp his style. That was it. He could be kind if kindness caused him no problems.

Gabrielle Roy
Never in her life had any object, or friendship, or experience acquired value for her save through the eyes of others.

Gabrielle Roy
"That money," she cried, almost vehemently, "you can be sure I won't lay a hand on it unless there's terrible need." He looked away. He couldn't bear to hear her talking about the rents and poverty. Would the two of them ever talk about anything else? Was that what he'd come home for? To hear more complaints? Outside people were hurrying past, almost racing toward the busy streets of town. Others were on their way to the movies. Girls were going out to meet their boyfriends. There was youth in the streets, and all of that was waiting for him.

Gabrielle Roy
He realized that Florentine personified this kind of wretched life against which his whole being was in revolt. And in the same moment he understood the feeling that drew him toward her: she was his own poverty, his solitude, his sad childhood, his lonely youth. She was all that he had hated, all that he had left behind him, but also everything that remained intimately linked to him, the most profound part of his nature and the powerful spur of his destiny.

Gabrielle Roy
"Don't preach," said Florentine violently. She was beginning to see the maze of lies and deceptions that lay before her.

Gabrielle Roy
For if you measure out and water down your happiness, the time comes when it ceases to act as a tonic. No, she thought, if you want to be happy, you must let yourself go, you must take a full dose.

Gabrielle Roy
When there was enough money for their needs, the ties between them had been strong, but once the money was lacking, what a strain was put on their love!

Gabrielle Roy
Rose-Anna was tugging at the edge of her apron with a tired, futile gesture she had never made in the past – the grandmother's gesture.

Gabrielle Roy