Margaret Trudeau

“Do you know what prepares you for the mental hospital? Being a prime minister's wife.”

“I don't think I'm marriage material, to tell you the truth. I'd be a bad choice. But I'd be darling at being a girlfriend.”

“I don't paint, and I can't draw, but I see things, I think, quite well, and I love being able to freeze things with the camera, particularly the children. Then I discovered with the camera that you can tell a whole story with just freezing a moment in reality. I find it a very good way, a very satisfying feeling.”

“I tend to keep the press at a distance, you know, and I don't really react to what they say. I react to what I feel more.”

“I don't think Pierre Trudeau knew how to be a husband. I couldn't stay in that marriage.”

“Every day is wonderful for me.”

“Don't feel badly when you take off work to go for a run, to go for a walk; don't feel badly to take time to play with your children, to be part of their lives. Work is important, but you can't work at your best unless you're a whole person.”

“If you rely completely on protocol, you can become a robot.”

“I think our jobs as parents is to raise our children with empathy - to figure out who this little character is, almost from birth, and then guide them to fulfill their best potential.”

“Politics is an ugly and thankless role.”

“I'm pretty much an out-front, straightforward chick, and I get a bit confused by expectations.”

“I tried to be a good wife, but I was lost in my gilded cage.”

“I've had such an exciting life.”

“I wince at some of the things I did as the young wife of Canada's fifteenth prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.”

“The main thing that triggered my depression was my isolation that was imposed on me by becoming the wife of the prime minister, and leaving my home, my family. I was young, very young, and very naive and very hopeful and enthusiastic about my wonderful new life, but it was the loneliness and the lack of being able to properly relate to people.”

“I want to be more than a rose in my husband's lapel.”

“You have got to give. There is no other reason to be on the planet.”

“Suddenly I turned 65 and realized, 'Oh my goodness, I'm old.' I think it was when I got into the movie theatres cheaper.”

“A truly empowered woman turns her values into verbs. She understands what she values most, and she takes steps to bring that value to life.”

“I certainly don't have all the answers, but I know this to be true: we have a great degree of control over what happens to us in the last third of our lives.”