canadian-novels

"There's really no fun in being sensible all the time, Diana."

"Not even a husband's funeral could damp Clarice down long," said Agatha Drew. "There was nothing solid about her. Always dancing and singing."

"Such a nice swishy petticoat," sighed Nan. "When I grow up will I have tafty petticoats like that, Mummy?"

"Of course it sounds very foolish. Dreams do sound so foolish when they are put into cold brutal words."

"Don't grudge Anne Cordelia her fancies, Diana. I'm always sorry for children who don't spend a few years in fairyland."

"Such a lovely day... made for us," said Diana. "I'm afraid it's a pet day though... there'll be rain tomorrow."

""If a kiss could be seen I think it would look like a violet," said Priscilla."

"Every morn is a fresh beginning,"

"I don't care what people think about me if they don't let me see it."

"For a moment Anne's heart fluttered queerly and for the first time her eyes faltered under Gilbert's gaze and a rosy flush stained the paleness of her face. It was as if a veil that had hung before her inner consciousness had been lifted, giving to her view a revelation of unsuspected feelings and realities. Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one's life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one's side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps . . . perhaps . . . love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath."

"Well, we must name this place before we leave it," said Anne, yielding to the indisputable logic of facts. "Everybody suggest a name and we'll draw lots. Diana?"

""Look do you see that poem?" she said suddenly, pointing."

"Fancies are like shadows . . . you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things."

"Anne laughed, sipped the honey from the tribute, and cast away the sting. She was used to taking her compliments mixed."

"I think her parents gave her the only right and fitting name that could possibly be given her," said Anne. "If they had been so blind as to name her Elizabeth or Nellie or Muriel she must have been called Lavendar just the same, I think. It's so suggestive of sweetness and old-fashioned graces and 'silk attire.' Now, my name just smacks of bread and butter, patchwork and chores."

"I imagined out a most interesting dialogue between the asters and the sweet peas and the wild canaries in the lilac bush and the guardian spirit of the garden. When I go home I mean to write it down. I wish I had a pencil and paper to do it now, because I daresay I'll forget the best parts before I reach home."

"Keeping the house spirit happy— I mean, from a historical perspective— It was probably like some kind of justification for the endless amounts of housework the women had to do, right?"

"Lis’s mushrooms. Lis’s house. Very old. There are rules."

"A second chance awaits. 1. Write your mistake 2. Ingest one mushroom 3. Go to sleep 4. Wake anew Events must occur on these premises"

"Is that weird? It’s my little ritual. You know, keeping the house spirit happy."

"Have you seen this like skinny, white-haired, maybe-homeless girl hanging around the restaurant lately? She kinda has… red eyes. Reddish."

"We make things good for them… They make things good for us. It’s so simple."

"The Emperor, the consensus seems to be, was an excessively suspicious man. Fear has many forms, but it is never so dangerous as when it is combined with power and perpetual uncertainty."

"Those of us who survived will always be bewildered when we recall his arrival. And not just because he was so different then. In a strange sense he never changed. We changed. If he seems so different to us now, it is because he was the figure that transformed the ground."

". . . even though the skin-spies were exposed relatively early in the course of the Holy War, most believed the Cishaurim rather than the Consult to be responsible. This is the problem of all great revelations: their significance so often exceeds the frame of our comprehension. We understand only after, always after. Not simply when it is too late, but precisely because it is too late."

"Even the hard-hearted avoid the heat of desperate men. For the bonfires of the weak crack the most stone."

"Many have condemned those who joined the Holy War for mercenary reasons, and doubtless, should this humble history find its way into their idle libraries, they will blast me as well. Admittedly, my reasons for joining the Holy War were “mercenary,” if by that one means I joined it in order to procure ends outside of the destruction of the heathen and the reconquest of Shimeh. But there were a great many mercenaries such as myself, and like myself, they inadvertently furthered the Holy War by killing their fair share of heathen. The failure of the Holy War had nothing to do with us. Did I say failure? Perhaps “transformation” would be a better word."

"Faith is the truth of passion. Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing."

"The event itself was unprecedented: not since the fall of Cenei to the Scylvendi hordes had so many potentates gathered in one place. But few knew Mankind itself lay upon the balance. And who could guess that a brief exchange of glances, not the Shriah’s edict, would tip the balance? But is this not the very enigma of history? When one peers deep enough, one always finds that catastrophe and triumph, the proper objects of the historian’s scrutiny, inevitably turn upon the small, the trivial, the nightmarishly accidental. When I reflect overmuch on this fact, I do not fear that we are “drunks at the sacred dance,” as Protathis writes, but that there is no dance at all."

". . . and that revelation murdered all that I once did know. Where once I asked of the God, “Who are you?” now I ask, “Who am I?”"

". . . though he consorts with man, woman and child, though he lays with beasts and makes a mockery of his seed, never shall he be as licentious as the philosopher, who lays with all things imaginable."

"So who were the heroes and the cravens of the Holy War? There are already songs enough to answer that question. Needless to say, the Holy War provided further violent proof of Ajencis’s old proverb, “Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying.”"

"Reason, Ajencis writes, is the capacity to overcome unprecedented obstacles in the gratification of desire. What distinguished man from beasts is man’s capacity to overcome infinite obstacles through reason. But Ajencis has confused the accidental for the essential. Prior to the capacity to overcome infinite obstacles is the capacity to confront them. What defines man is not that he reasons, but that he prays."

"And the Nonman King cried words that sting: “Now to me you must confess, For death above you hovers!” And the Emissary answered ever wary: “We are the race of flesh, We are the race of lovers.”"

"I have explained how Maithanet yoked the vast resources of the Thousand Temples to ensure the viability of the Holy War. I have described, in outline, the first steps taken by the Emperor to bind the Holy War to his imperial ambitions. I have attempted to reconstruct the initial reaction of the Cishaurim in Shimeh from their correspondence with the Padirajah in Nenciphon. And I have even mentioned the hated Consult, of whom I can at long last speak without fear of ridicule. I have spoken, in other words, almost exclusively of powerful factions and their impersonal ends. What of vengeance? What of hope? Against the frame of competing nations and warring faiths, how did these small passions come to rule the Holy War?"

"Some say men continually war against circumstances, but I say they perpetually flee. What are the works of men if not a momentary respite, a hiding place soon to be discovered by catastrophe? Life is endless flight before the hunter we call the world."

"R. Scott Bakker. Second book in the Prince of Nothing series."

"The author has often observed that in the genesis of great events, men generally possess no inkling of what their actions portend. This problem is not, as one might suppose, a result of men’s blindness to the consequences of their actions. Rather it is a result of the mad way the dreadful turns on the trivial when the ends of one man cross the ends of another. The Schoolmen of the Scarlet Spires have an old saying: “When one man chases a hare, he finds a hare. But when many men chase a hare, they find a dragon.” In the prosecution of competing human interests, the result is always unknown, and all too often, terrifying."

"Nonmen, Sranc, and Men: The first forgets, The third regrets,And the second has all of the fun."

"I write to inform you that during my most recent audience, the Nansur Emperor, quite without provocation, publicly addressed me as “fool.” You are, no doubt, unmoved by this. It has become a common occurrence. The Consult eludes us now more than ever. We hear them only in the secrets of others. We glimpse them only through the eyes of those who deny their very existence. Why should we not be called fools? The deeper the Consult secretes itself among the Great Factions, the madder our rantings sound to their ears. We are, as the damned Nansur would say, “a hunter in the thicket”—one who, by the very act of hunting, extinguishes all hope of running down his prey."

"There was something curiously pathetic, he thought, about the notion of the man plotting with his grandmother, like two beggars sneering at those too poor to give more than coppers."

"He wondered whether the old drab had taken Skeaos as a lover. Likely, he concluded, and winced at the accompanying image. Like a prune fucking a twig, he thought"

"I shall never tire of underlining a concise little fact which these superstitious people are loath to admit—namely, that a thought comes when “it” wants, not when “I” want . . ."

"If it is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing. Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything."

"This is a history of a great and tragic holy war, of the mighty factions that sought to possess and pervert it, and of a son searching for his father. And as with all histories, it is we, the survivors, who will write its conclusion."

"There are three, and only three, kinds of men in the world: cynics, fanatics, and Mandate Schoolmen."

"But despite stories of Fanim atrocities, the fact of the matter is that the Kianene, heathen or no, were surprisingly tolerant of Inrithi pilgrimages to Shimeh—before the Holy War, that is. Why would a people devoted to the destruction of the Tusk extend this courtesy to “idolaters”? Perhaps they were partially motivated by the prospect of trade, as others have suggested. But the fundamental motive lies in their desert heritage. The Kianene word for a holy place is si’ihkhalis, which means, literally, “great oasis.” On the open desert it is their strict custom to never begrudge travelers water, even if they be enemies."

"When we truly apprehend the Gods, the Nilnameshi sages say, we recognize them not as kings but as thieves. This is among the wisest of blasphemies, for we always see the king who cheats us, never the thief."

"How should one describe the terrible majesty of the Holy War? Even then, still unblooded, it was both frightening and wondrous to behold, a great beast whose limbs were composed of entire nations—Galeoth, Thunyerus, Ce Tydonn, Conriya, High Ainon, and the Nansurium—and with the Scarlet Spires as the dragon’s maw, no less. Not since the days of the Ceneian Empire or the Ancient North has the world witnessed such an assembly. Even diseased by politics, it was a thing of awe."

"Stupid men, Conphas had found, tended to be excessively proud of their few brilliant moments."