Novelists From Canada

"These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth’s reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers."

"A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience."

"Fortune had done him few favors in the past, and he wasn’t sure he trusted it."

"What we cannot remember, we must rediscover."

"[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them."

"We’ll do what life always does—defy expectations."

"Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely."

"“You learning anything from this?” Tyrell asked. Turk stood up and brushed his hands. “Yeah. I'm learning that I know even less than I thought I did.”"

"“When was it obvious she was ill?” “Weeks ago. Or maybe—looking back on it—well—months.” “Has she had any kind of medical attention?” Pause. “Simon?” “No.” “Why not?” “It didn’t seem necessary.” “It didn’t seem necessary?” “Pastor Dan wouldn’t allow it.” I thought: And did you tell Pastor Dan to go fuck himself?"

"His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith."

"He rolled his eyes. “Those are things people say, Tyler. Talking about multilateralism and diplomacy is like saying ‘I love you’—it serves to facilitate the fucking."

"I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute."

"An honest book is almost as good as a friend."

"The village muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Diane ignored the sound."

"“It never fails to astonish me,” Carol said. “The tenacity of love.”"

"The world is what it is and won’t be bargained with."

"He’s exactly what she wants. He’s the last thing she needs."

"“We might have destroyed ourselves, but at least it would have been our own fault.” “Would it, though? Whose fault exactly? Yours? Mine? No, it would have been the result of several billion human beings making relatively innocuous choices: to have kids, drive a car to work, keep their job, solve the short-term problems first. When you reach the point at which even the most trivial acts are punishable by the death of the species, then obviously, obviously, you’re at a critical juncture, a different kind of point of no return.”"

"Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility."

"This would have been less annoying had it been untrue."

"His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City’s genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors."

"I don’t believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive."

"Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere."

"The suicidally disgruntled were legion, And their enemies included any and all Americans, Brits, Canadians, Danes, et cetera; or, conversely, all Moslems, dark-skinned people, non-English-speakers, immigrants; all Catholics, fundamentalists, atheists; all liberals, all conservatives...For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape."

"Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change."

"All the brands and flavors of Big Salvation. At the last minute we would devise a technological fix and save ourselves. Or: the Hypotheticals were benevolent beings who would turn the planet into a peaceable kingdom. Or: God would rescue us all, or at least the true believers among us. Or. Or. Or. Big Salvation. It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn’t the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation."

"We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father’s unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars."

"You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes—you'll see."

"It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel’s ass."

"Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced."

"Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?"

"“It’s complicated, Jesse. There’s the official story. There’s the real story. And there’s the conspiracy theory.” “Tell me the real story.” “I would, but I don’t know what it is.” “Well, then what’s the official story? And who declared it official?”"

"Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity."

"There’s no drug that’ll make a stupid man smart."

"“Baumgartner’s coke habit isn’t the secret she thinks it is, and it gives us leverage.” “Coke?” “Coke, yeah, you know: cocaine. When she powders her nose, she literally powders her nose.”"

"Not all idealism is fake."

"“Even if you could talk to it, you wouldn’t learn anything. All it would tell you is what it wanted you to hear. Or no, not even what it wants you to hear; it would generate words that in some kind of model of possible outcomes produce a result that enhances the likelihood of its reproductive success.” “I do that too,” Leo said. “From time to time.” Smiling. “Smartass,” Cassie said."

"And the question she found herself asking now that Leo was asleep beside her was: had she fallen in love? Because that was how it felt. But only a few minutes ago her body had exploded into an orgasm so intense that it probably registered on the Richter scale, so maybe her judgment wasn’t entirely unbiased."

"The only reason you can’t see how crazy this is is because we’ve been neck-deep in crazy for years."

"What is intelligence, exactly? Maybe that sounds like a simple question. We know—or think we know—what our own kind of intelligence is like. After all, we experience it on a daily basis. But there are other kinds of intelligence. There is the intelligence of the hive—the complex behavior that arises from individually unintelligent organisms following a few simple behavioral rules in response to cues from the environment. And there is a kind of intelligence that inheres in the ecosystem as a whole. Evolution, over time, has created entities as diverse as crinoids and mushrooms and harbor seals and howler monkeys, all without a predetermined goal and without devoting even a moment of thought to the subject. You might even conclude that this kind of thoughtless intelligence is more powerful and patient than our own."

"“What are you saying, you think he’s completely sane?” “No. But I’m not sure any of us rises to that standard.”"

"Evolution can’t be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it’s a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn’t aim."

"All the pious high-school bullshit about the Century of Peace had been revealed for what it was: as artificial as a plastic nativity scene and as hollow as a split piñata. The world was peaceful the way a drunken coed passed out at a frat party was peaceful: it was the peace that facilitated the fucking."

"His sympathy (that is, for a caterpillar parasitized by a wasp) was an anthropomorphism, a projection. The caterpillar was hardly more than a protein engine enacting a suite of encoded behaviors. A meat robot. As am I, except that in the case of Ethan’s species evolution had conjured a knowing self out of chemistry and contingency. I feel, therefore I abhor."

"Cassie had seen pictures in textbooks, of ranks of men in brown uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders: the Allied Expeditionary Force, off to join the battered Brits and French. And pictures of the muddy European trenches: Ypres, Passchendaele, the Marne, where countless young men had been slaughtered by other young men as bewildered and obedient as themselves."

"“Truth is a perilous commodity,” Julian admitted, “but so is ignorance, Adam—more so.”"

"Reproduction, Nerissa thought: Ethan had once called it the blade of evolution. There was no intelligence in evolution, only the cutting-board logic of selective reproduction. She envisioned the work of evolution as a kind of blind, inarticulate poetry. We are the was it Charles Darwin had said? From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved…There is grandeur in this view of life. Grandeur or horror. The idea that all the kaleidoscopic strangeness of biological systems could unfold without guidance or motivation was almost too unsettling to accept."

"Ris, it can’t tell the truth—it can’t distinguish between truth and lies. You know that. It uses words to manipulate people."

"Life shites on hope."

"What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust."