Novelists From Canada

"Man has historically devoted much more subtle and ingenious thought to inflicting cruelty than to giving others pleasure — which, given his gregarious nature, would seem a much more survival-oriented behavior. Poll any hundred people at random and you'll find at least twenty or thirty who know all there is to know about psychological torture and psychic castration — and maybe two who know how to give a terrific back-rub."

"God is an iron," I said. "Did you know that?" I turned to look at her and she was staring. She laughed experimentally, stopped when I failed to join in. "And I'm a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?" "If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. Or else He's the dumbest designer that ever lived."

"I've tried it with men and women and boys and girls, in the dark and in the desert sun, with people I cared for and people I didn't give a damn about, and I have never understood the pleasure in it. The best it's ever been for me is not uncomfortable."

"I wanted to understand."

"I was putting together a picture of a life that would have depressed anyone with the sensitivity of a rhino. Back when I had first seen her, when her features were alive, she had looked sensitive. Or had that been a trick of the juice?"

"Animated the face might have been beautiful — any set of features can support beauty — but even a superb makeup job could not have made her pretty."

"Five days of wireheading alone should have killed her, never mind sudden cold turkey."

"I had just seen the two most horrible things. The first was the smile. They say that when the bomb went off at Hiroshima, some people's shadows were baked onto walls by it. I think that smile got baked on the surface of my brain in much the same way. I don't want to talk about that smile."

"I smelled her before I saw her. Even so, the first sight was shocking."

"Nikky has more fiber than I do, I guess: he doesn't let a little thing like death slow him down."

"As Bob Dylan forgot to say, "To live outside the law, you must be lucky.""

"It's always coldest before the warm."

"Mary Kay is one of the secret masters of the world: a librarian. They control information. Don't ever piss one off."

"The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality."

"Terror leaves you when you despair; once you let yourself hope again it returns redoubled."

"It is relatively foolproof—but you’re right, I forgot to make it moronproof."

"He stroked my hair. “But don’t worry. To coin a phrase, I have a plan.”"

"“Any time you offer your honor, I will gladly honor your offer.” “‘—and all night long it was on ’er and off ’er,’” Mary said."

"The Professor had come back from the Infinite. His eyes unrolled, his shoulders slumped slightly, and he acquired a wistful smile, as of one leaving Paradise to attend a sales convention in Columbus, Ohio."

"Please, dear. Vengeance is counterproductive. Not to mention the fact that it gets your soul all sticky."

"An unkind God gave us more tender places than He gave us hands to cover them."

"My father used to say that you couldn’t trust Soviet technology—unless it was a weapon. “Paranoids,” he said, “can be relied on to make the best weapons.”"

"Take it from your Aunt Maureen: if there is any way you can arrange your affairs so as to avoid dropping into whorehouse garbage from a great height, naked in February, then that is almost certainly the course your life should take."

"Maybe I’m being illogical. I like word games, anagrams, palindromes, verbal puzzles: why are they okay and straight puns abhorrent? I think because in a straight pun, all the cleverness and wit has been used to poke a hole through the very idea of language, the possibility of communicating unambiguously with words—and that’s too dismaying to be funny to me."

"Oh, any bordello hears secrets, by definition: if our culture were not so sick that natural healthy urges are deadly secrets, there would be little need for bordellos. Father Newman suggested once, only half kidding, that we artists—that all prostitutes—function rather like priests for people who feel more natural confessing their sins while naked."

"As the poet tells us: once a king, always a king—but once a night is often sufficient."

"Don’t waste time blaming the bull if you can’t make it moo."

"If you’ve lived a bad life, they send you to Hell. But if you’ve been truly wicked, they give you a tour of Heaven first…."

"Lady Sally does not permit any kind of contempt here. Not even self-contempt. Maybe especially not self-contempt. Art with contempt in it is always sour."

"This is a House of healthy repute—no sleaze, fleas or social disease."

"There are basically three kinds of prostitute: street hooker, call girl, and house whore. Each kind is convinced that the other two are the lowest of the low."

"“To all the Callahan's Places there ever were or ever will be,” Spider Robinson says, “whatever they may be called—and to all the merry maniacs and happy fools who are fortunate enough to stumble into one: may none of them arrive too late!”"

"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased; thus do we refute entropy."

"If we have to, we can all go to Hell together—maybe there’s a group rate."

"Next morning I decided that hangovers are like sex—the second time isn’t quite as painful. If the analogy held, by tomorrow I’d be enjoying it."

"We talk endlessly of the individual and of individualism, for example, when any sensible glance at major issues indicates that we live in an era of great conformism. Our societies turn upon democratic principles, yet the quasi totality of our leading citizens refuse to take part in that process and, instead, leave the exercise of political power to those for whom they have contempt. Our business leaders hector us in the name of capitalism, when most of them are no more than corporate employees, isolated from personal risk."

"Just as the unleashing of ideas and myths in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cleared the way for endless changes in state and social structures, so the subsequent pinning down and splitting up of language into feudal states has now made it impossible for the citizen to participate seriously in society. The inviting humanist irony of the early days has given way to the off-putting rational cynicism and sloganeering of our time."

"[T]he ideal of the rugged individual opening up the American West is still applied as an essential truth to ten million citizens living in the small area of New York City, as if ten million bulls should and could be squeezed into a china shop."

"...a clever Toronto lawyer was deep into a technical argument before the Supreme Court. His position was dependent upon a close reading of the legal text and turned on the letter of the law. Suddenly the chief justice, Beverley McLachlin, leaned forward and asked the counsel if his argument also worked in French. After all, the law is the law in both languages and a loophole in one tends to evaporate in the other. Only an argument of substance stands up. The lawyer had no idea what to reply."

"Romans disapproved of Greek sports because the athletes competed nude. That was shocking. On the other hand, people dripping with blood and dying for entertainment was fine. This is strangely similar to the moral standards of today's commercial television and family movies."

"Of course, corporations and governments have a right to something for their money. They pay the wages. But they don't have the ethical right to literally purchase the copyright of a citizen's potential contribution to society. In a democracy they should not have the legal right to silence the quasi-totality of the functioning élite in order to satisfy a managerial taste for control and secrecy."

""Non-fiction", on the other hand, declares itself to be the carrier of fact, an expression of reality, and thus of truth. Why then does most fact-based work have a remarkably short shelf life? The reply might be that additional facts come along. That we are learning all the time. In that case, it was never an expression of reality or truth. And even if the facts are overtaken, the arguments built upon them should not date with such terrifying rapidity. Decade-old serious "non-fiction" often seems arcane, irrelevant. The written style itself seems to become old-fashioned. Two-centuries-old decent "fiction" on the other hand can easily remain fresh."

"The clarity of Socrates' situation is remarkable. ... his exit is wonderfully seductive. It is calm, clear, convincing. Friends are present, wise words are said, the ethical unfolding of life is tied up in a neat package. And then he slips away, slowly becoming stone-cold from the feet up. It is our fantasy of the normal death, with the addition of social and prophetic implications, to say nothing of heroic proportions. Again, most of us will likely drop dead on a subway platform, in the middle of an orgasm or straining on a toilet seat early in the morning. The real tragedy of death may be just how often it is comic."

"Ten per cent of our neighbours survive on charity. 10 per cent of Canadians eat through charity. 10 per cent. Surely if you were prime minister or minister of trade or of industry, you would wake up each day thinking that, for reasons that escape you, the central policy chosen to drive the economy is not working. It is not working because it is not meeting the needs of a democracy in which legitimacy lies with the citizenry."

"As you would expect when individualism is based only on opportunity, no one asks what happens to those who have neither the financial nor the political clout to exercise their tiny portion of that opportunity."

"What I am describing is not only a society dominated by corporatist structures, but by the received wisdom of a corporatist atmosphere: one in which the élites are interest-driven, whatever their jobs. And so the society is gradually being redrawn to suit this ethic-free system."

"Ever since the democratic systems permitted their various courts to give corporations the status of persons, the individual as citizen has been on the defensive. How could it be otherwise? If you are a person before the law and Exxon or Ford is also a person, it is clear that the concept of democratic legitimacy lying with the individual has been mortally wounded."

"The old cliché about having all your eggs in one basket takes on new meaning with Canada and the United States, because there is something even more wrong about having all your eggs in someone else's basket. It is worse still if that country is much larger than you and worst of all if they don't have all their eggs in your basket. This is not a relationship. It is a dependency. Canada's survival will depend largely on its ability to change that dependency back into a relationship. And one of the key factors in doing that will be the redistribution of our trade. But we can't do that if we have no politicians willing to take the lead."

"Canada is either an idea or it does not exist. It is either an intellectual undertaking or it is little more than a resource-rich vacuum lying in the buffer zone just north of a great empire."

"After all, in both languages we were dealing in large measure not with English and French, but with Scots and Irish, Bretons and Normans....There could be no more eloquent illustration of the colonial mind-set than a bunch of Celts and Vikings in a distant northern territory insulting each other as les anglais and the French as if they were the descendants of the people who had subjected and ruined them."