People From Ontario

"“Well, perhaps you have begun your journey toward wisdom, Mr. Flattery,” Kent said seriously. “We have such a short time and the journey is so terribly long. One cannot begin too soon.”"

"Dandish was the ideal empiricist. Pushing back the borders of ignorance, that was his only reason for living."

"No man of the first rank is ever satisfied with his accomplishments, no matter what others make of them."

"“Never,” he said firmly, “be intimidated by a person because of the size of house in which they were born.”"

"The carriage, Tristam realized, was becoming the metaphor for this period of his life: he neither owned, drove, nor directed one in any way but was simply carried along."

"Roderick has been known to have titles and estates granted to those in his circle for accomplishing nothing more than constant agreement with his opinions, but those he has not befriended could save the kingdom and hardly receive a note of thanks. It is the way of the court and courtiers. But not everyone is so blind."

"Wood is a gift from the world of nature to we undeserving men...One should be thankful for such gifts, take no more than we need, and waste none of that."

"While Apple's attempt to control the ecosystem and maintain a closed platform may be good for Apple, developers want more options and customers want to fully access the overwhelming majority of Web sites that use Flash. We think many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple. … even people inside the distortion field [at Apple] will begin to resent being told half a story."

"[Apple and the iPhone is] kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers … But in terms of a sort of a sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that's overstating it."

"A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you."

"[Some time later, after his actions became known] Meanwhile, Fremlin acted quickly. He told my mother he would kill me if I ever went to the police, and wrote letters to my family, blaming me for the abuse."

"In spite of the letters and threats, my mother went back to Fremlin, and stayed with him until he died in 2013. She said that she had been "told too late," she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her."

"In 1976, I went to visit my mother, Alice Munro, for the summer at her home in Clinton, Ont. One night, while she was away, her husband, my stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me. I was nine years old."

"Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again."

"I want my stories to move people, I don’t care if they are men or women or children. I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn’t that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn’t mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish."

"Alice Munro's Open Secrets is so liberating and exciting for any new story writer to feel her open textures, her bold reach, her plainness, with no showing off, no special effects. She reminds us that there's no formula for a story, it can be as loosely woven as you like, as long as the inner logic works organically. Easier said of course, much easier said, than done."

"She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood: that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements."

"“,” is a true story about . Reading her life and dramatizing it, I could find all these things . . . some have changed, and some haven’t that much. Oh, I love that story – I love her. I love her femininity, her weaknesses as well as her strengths. The way she falls desperately in love with and she just can’t give him up. But what does he hold against her? Her achievements"

"'The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you're just there, going along easy in the world.'"

"This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all. The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember. This is what happens. Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you."

"Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her."

"People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish. And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong."

"You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations."

"In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places."

"Now that we can do anything, what will we do?"

"The fundamental truth about globalization — that it represents freedom for capital and unfreedom for labour — is especially clear where global migrants are concerned."

"The Greek philosopher Plato may have rejected the idea that "might makes right" some 2,500 years ago, but America and its allies today make it the cornerstone of foreign policy."

"What was it, then, about the development of capitalism that gave rise to modern racial ideology?"

"Globalization is thus also about global commodification of labour; it is about — global proletarianization — the creation of a world working class for capital to exploit."

"In short, the rules of behaviour in capitalist society systematically produce irrational consequences."

"In many respects, the Second World War was a continuation of the First, a conflict triggered by the mismatch between industrial power and imperial reach."

"Contrary to liberal myth, Smith was not an apologist for capitalists. He argued in fact, that capitalists always seek "to deceive and oppress the public" by conspiring to inflate their prices and profits."

"The neoliberal utopia of unrestrained capitalism is being created by a war against the poor and the commons. In fact, the "new enclosures" are a sign that the struggles that marked the birth of capitalism are still very much alive."

"Behind their fluffy rhetoric about free trade and free markets lurks a hostility toward freedom for ordinary people — and a love affair with police and prisons."

"Common wealth is in the process of being transferred from the public domain to the private sector."

"Put baldly, globalization has been nothing less than a mechanism for a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich — in other words, exactly what it is was designed to be."

"Once capitalist classes learn to live with unions — which they generally do reluctantly, only after efforts to crush them have failed — they then attempt to co-opt organized labour. They do so by courting a "special relationship" with union leaders who, as their organizations become larger and more complex, typically assume the role of full time union functionaries."

"Corporate globalization and the economic agreements designed to entrench it have little to do with trade — and all but the most ignorant neo-liberal pundits surely know this too."

""Free trade" is a slogan used to attack practices designed by competitor economies to protect their own interests."

"To make history — to change the actual course of world events — is intoxicating, inspiring, and life-transforming."

""Free trade" is a policy imposed on the weakest and evaded by the most powerful."

"At its heart, this book is about where this new left has come from, and where it might be going."

"When history moves — really moves — it does so in great convulsive jolts."

"Under , in other words, the right of corporations to bring thousands of tons of hazardous waste into local communities overrides the right of residents to protect their health."

"Genuine growth is always dialogical — it requires engagement in a dynamic, developing, and open-ended dialogue."

"A society that has moved beyond commodification is one that has embraced the most thoroughgoing radical democracy in all spheres of social life."

"Social movements will not develop if they refuse to name and define alternative possibilities."

"The suffering inflicted by this present order invariably produces a struggle to overcome it."

"While you can’t keep fear from visiting, you can slam the door in its face. With God’s promise in your hand, that’s exactly what you are able to do."

"Fear is the contradiction of faith. Faith says, Whatever it is, it’ll be okay because of God."