Quotes by Mordecai Richler

“Shame on you. Don't tell me you've been married for an hour and you've already got eyes for another woman.”

“I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of...”

“When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me,...”

“If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and...”

“It seems to me that our lives are consumed by countless wasting years, but only a few shining moments. I missed mine. Yes is what I should have said. Of course I should have said yes.”

“Following the death of his wife, Sam Johnson wrote to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, "I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wilds of life, ...”

“Bad days my memory functions no better than an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, but other days me recall is painfully perfect.”

“I'm rambling again. Wandering off the point. But this is the true story of my wasted life...”

“Better my right hand should have been cut off. Go know I was setting in motion events that would lead to the ruin of one of the few truly good men I ever met.”

“...and then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving...”

“Without a doubt, it [Canada] is the land God gave to Cain.”

“Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.”

“In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony.”

“But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit.”

“And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled?”

“But I hate being a grandfather. It's indecent. In my mind's eye, I'm still twenty-five. Thirty-three max. Certainly not sixty-seven, reeking of decay and dashed hopes. My breath sour. My limbs in d...”

“Cripples are not the stuff of romance. Only Lord Byron, dragging his club foot, springs to mind as an exception to the rule, but such a failing in a man is regarded as interesting, even provocative...”

“All the same, it strikes me as unfair that I still have to defend myself against her moral judgements. My continuing need for her approbation is pathetic. Twice now I have stopped myself on the str...”

“We could never agree about Boogie and I didn't share Miriam's reverence for professors. In fact, just in case I haven't mentioned it before, the pride of my office wall is my framed high-school gra...”

“Ernst was still in the Eastern Zone, about ninety kilometres from Berlin, when the truck emerged so inexplicably out of nowhere that it seemed to have been created by the rain itself.”