89 quotes found
Novelist · Canadian
Canadian novelist
“I do not 'get' ideas ideas get me.”
“I was a talking lover, which most women hate.”
“The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.”
“The love of truth lies at the root of much humour.”
“Wake up! Be yourself, not a bad copy of something else!”
“One learns ones mystery at the price of ones innocence.”
“Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not hap...”
“I was afraid and did not know what I feared, which is the worst kind of fear.”
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
“...so Leola thought that a modest romance with a hero in embryo could do no harm - might even be a patriotic duty.”
“Now I want you to remember something because I don't think we shall meet again very soon. It is this; however fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however pow...”
“All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children....”
“I am quite a wise old bird, but I am no desert hermit who can only prophesy when his guts are knotted with hunger. I am deep in the old mans puzzle, trying to link the wisdom of the body with the w...”
“But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory--humorous, poignant, humane allegory--disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience thro...”
“But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everythin...”
“...the Conservative party found him an embarrassment because he was apt to criticize the party leader in public, the Liberals naturally wanted to defeat him, and the newspapers were out to get him....”
“Just about all men need a woman in one way or another, unless theyre very strange indeed. Tormenting you refreshes him. And you shouldnt underestimate the gratitude all men feel for womens beauty. ...”
“That was what stuck in the craws of all the good women of Deptford: Mrs Dempster had not been raped, as a decent woman would have beenno, she had yielded because a man wanted her. The subject was n...”
“The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean and pretty. The peony was unchaste, dishevelled as peonies must be, and at the height of its beau...”
“Faustina is a great work of the Creator. She has nothing of what you call brains; she doesn't need them for her destiny... It is to be glorious for a few years: not to outlive some dull husband and...”
“In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast of min...”
“Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, e...”
“Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill-defined though it was, that a serious study of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical ...”
“Pessimism is a very easy way out when youre considering what life really is, because pessimism is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today and what has happened just s...”
“Schoolmastering kept me busy by day and part of each night. I was an assistant housemaster, with a fine big room under the eaves of the main building, and a wretched kennel of a bedroom, and rights...”
“They were untouched by modern education, but their government was striving with might and main to procure this inestimable benefit for them; anticlericalism and American bustle would soon free them...”
