Novelists From Canada

"That uncountable myths and legends and ecclesiastical operas and dirges have at their core, if not in their trappings, near identical mechanisms, performances, and outcomes is proof most solid of the centrality of the panhuman subconscious—or superconscious—experience of the myriad and manifold wonders and terrors of the cosmos."

"Much has been dissected from among the myths to explore the significance of the mortal endurance and experience of pain. Pain, we are told, purifies the body, expands the mind, prepares the novice for the tests of life and therefore for initiation into the clan, the sect, the tribe, the gang, the squadron, the priesthood, the academy, the coven, or the board. It is clear that such suppositions regarding physical or emotional pain are true; little more need be said on such matters."

"The history of human development can neatly be divided into two epochs: (1) the feminine, yin, agro-sedentary pastoral idyll of the old-to-late Paleolithic Mother-Earth-Goddess religions and (2) the masculine, yang, technomobile hunter-gatherer-warrior field effect of urbanized, late-Neolithic-to-Modern Father-Sky-God religions."

"I know I’m not the same man I was eight days ago. And I know it’s time to find out who I am."

"How odd—disturbing, in fact—to hear someone address a god with such profane irreverence. But I suppose that the history of mythology is nothing if not proof that celestials are the instructors of man’s worst sins."

"Nothing like hope to doom you."

"“You know, in my experience,” said Kareem, caging his fingers and drawing out his words, “the jokers...who talk the most about ‘playing the race card’...are the people who own all the diamonds...who’ve picked up the clubs...to beat down the spades...because they’ve got no heart.”"

"It’s a special kind of hugging, the kind where deep down you’re facing the unspoken fact that this’s the last time you’re gonna hold somebody, and so you make your cells hold on, make em drink in somebody’s scent and texture, so you can keep em with you after the world has taken em away."

"Violence in the air like the stench of gasoline."

"All organic. No chemicals here, no way. The red globe grapes, $8.99 a kilo. I take a pawful, pop em, one at a time. They crunch. This is my only wine. This is my Sunday sacrament...sweet and honest and decent. No lies from chemists, or from priests. You wanna heal your soul? Step one is healing your soil."

"It is better not to know and to know that one does not know, than presumptuously to attribute some random meaning to symbols."

"Good people get hurt—bad people get ahead, get rich, get your girl. Good doesn’t triumph over evil. So, do I believe in God? He doesn’t believe in me."

"Sky’s so big and dazzling and buzzing and crackling and moaning with all that black silence, I feel like my skull is open to space, all that way-beyond soaking directly into my brain. Stars and stars and stars...some of em planets, some of em satellites. All of em out there, alone, untouchable."

"I never sought glory. Basic respect would suffice."

"Good triumphs over evil when it’s better organized, better trained, better armed, sneakier, and gutsier than evil."

"As Carl Jung said, avoidance of legitimate suffering is the root of all mental illness. And one truth you must suffer is that everything and everyone you love will eventually die. Even gods."

"Paranoia speaks to a deeper drive than fear. Paranoia is a defiant charge to a cold, unfeeling cosmos: “Hear me! I exist! I’m important!” Because after all, if someone is actually orchestrating the chaos of the universe against you personally, then you do matter. When no one seems to care anymore, at least “enemies” give you the comforting illusion that you count."

"Believing in anyone more than you believe in yourself causes you to suspend your own judgment, which leads to counter-self-actualization, or self-deactivation."

"There’re two reasons those cubs were able to help anybody. They believed the same thing, and they were organised. That’s the rule of history. Without people, Harq, nothing happens… but without organisation, nothing lasts."

"We spent too much damn time getting down. Now it’s time to get up."

"“The Astriarchy gives those people a nice story about how they can meet up with their favourite member of the Five Immortals on the ‘Celestial Path.’ So no, don’t worry how bad things are right now in this universe right in front of us, because your reward’s coming later! Might as well drown them.”"

"“MAY THE FORCE—” “—FEED YOUR HORSE!”"

"We challenge ourselves to try at least four new bizarrities in every week’s groceries."

"Loopier than a snake in a garden hose."

"Thursday is practically Friday and Friday is Friday."

"In science, one becomes so obsessed with the number of feathers in a bird’s wing or its mass or muscular strength that one forgets the fact of the bird’s flight, or its beauty, or its existence. One forgets the truth of those things. Similarly, the artist who looks only within, without looking to the minutiae of the bird or the air in which the bird flies or the earth below the air, forgets those apparently solid details that may also lead him to truth. If he never bothers to examine a bird’s mass and strength, then his painting or poem can speak only of his own narcissism."

"You cannot look within, or rather, you refuse to. You fear to. So all of your manipulation of the exterior is ultimately meaningless, because it is devoid of any examined motivation. You seek to change your environment because you fear to gaze at that which makes you want to change it, because you fear that you may have to change yourself."

"I’m not saying Hamza’s cheap, but if the only thing standing between our solar system and a fleet of intergalactic enslavers was Hamza’s wallet crunched inside his fist, we’d all be drilling methane wells on Pluto right now."

"And I slept, and dreamt that I gazed through an electron microscope at the surface of the Guernica. I awoke to moonlight, and was troubled, and did not easily return to sleep."

"The actual world isn’t solidly real for you if you’ve been treading water in an ocean of lies your whole life."

"“Knowledge,” he said with overwhelming confidence, “can be dismissed as a collection of beliefs, or as you say, dogma, only by those so deluded with solipsism as to have no faith even in their own existence, let alone the existence of external entities—” “Inaccurate—” “I’m not done. ‘Knowledge’ is clearly the conscious affirmation, or verbal, or textual statement of that which is right and true and that of which scientific inquiry informs us.”"

"“The desire to assert that knowledge is pure subjectivity or that knowledge is never more than mere ill-founded belief is rooted in a twisted admiration for moral relativism, or perhaps worse, in an egocentric belief that ‘the universe is a product of my mind, and nothing else.’”"

"“You equate education with a desire to harm learners? Were you a human, I’d say your radicalism were driven by testosterone. In your case, I’d guess motor oil. “Education is not driven by a desire to delude learners or to harm them. On the contrary, it is our noblest activity; we import information—yes, information, the building blocks of knowledge—to students, such that they might assemble their own knowledge-acquisition drives and skills and modes. We educate such that the educated may educate themselves and others. “Indeed, we create the only perpetual motion machine: the self-aware, extra-aware cognitive engine, whose fuel is the world, whose ignition is lesson! We engage not in authoritarianism, but in liberation, for once genuine ignition is achieved, the engine discovers its own fuel; the vehicle, its own momentum."

"Everyone tensed. Rhetorical fingers twitched at the ragged leather of cerebral holsters."

"Experience exists and therefore is true in its mere existence, but perhaps not beyond. It may not be truthful in reference to anything beyond itself. But it may, in unprocessed form, be representative of truth in that it has not become crusted over with the false encoding of theory. And in art, one may, perhaps, create a distillation of experience, which, by being less rigidly composed and dogmatically-formed than science, be flexible enough to represent or transmit truth, or at least, to point towards it."

"We’re lynched on the rope of company credit."

"There’s only two types of people in the world, Ye, weird and boring."

"People get accustomed to evil like they get accustomed to smog or noise or graffiti! But it doesn’t change what it is."

"The ground I sit on is not the ground I sat on. The ground I sat on breathed and moved and shuttered and moaned. The ground I sit on is still and silent. The ground I sat on pushed out green things and was crawled on by all manner of crawling things and walked on by walking things. The ground I sit on feels no pad nor hoof nor foot nor claw. The ground I sat on was belly-earth, was food-land, was eating-soil. The ground I sit on is soot and silt and frost and weed. So I stand."

"Amazing how not censoring myself puts me in a good mood."

"The two former lovers finally looked at each other, their faces crawling with the crabs of conflicting emotion."

"Hnossi glowered at her daughter, a look cold enough to freeze sunshine and shatter it on the pavement."

"Duty often had undesirable consequences, but if it did not it would be self-indulgence and hedonism."

"Take responsibility for your own happiness, rather than claiming telepathy you don’t have (unless you are telepathic) or ascribing to others ugly thoughts you can’t verify, and aiming endless, nonspecific blame for your mediocrity at the Trilateral Commission, “the media,” SKULL, the RAND Corporation, the long-disbanded Treemasons, the MAN, the Black Helicopter Legion, or the perennial favorite of paranoiacs, “Them.”"

"Pain is too strong and life is too brief, brother, to avoid the pleasures that don’t hurt us."

"People are so lazy, they want everything to be simple, but nothing is simple. Nothing."

"That diabolical deviant is smarter than he smells."

"Lack of verifiability was a paranoiac’s playground paradise."

"They’re everything that’s wrong in this instant-coffee and microwave age. ‘I want it now.’ There used to be that romantic image of going off to Tibet and climbing the mountain to speak to the wise man. And when you got to the top, he could tell you the truths of the universe. Now people wanna take a helicopter to the top—or e-mail him!"

"Her weapon is her mouth. And it’s loaded and fully automatic."