Great Throughts Treasury

"Canada was built on dead beavers."

"CELL: Now look objectively. You have to admit the cancer cell is beautiful. If it were a flower, you'd say, How pretty, with its mauve center and pink petals of if a cover for a pulpy thirties sci-fi magazine. How striking: as an alien, a success, all purple eye and jelly tentacles and spines, or are they gills, creeping around on granular Martian dirt red as the inside of the body, while its tender walls expand and burst, its spores scatter elsewhere, take root, like money, drifting like a fiction or miasma in and out of people's brains, digging themselves industriously in. The lab technician says, It has forgotten how to die. But why remember? All it wants is more amnesia. More life, and more abundantly. to take more. to eat more. To replicate itself. To keep on doing those things forever. Such desires are not unknown. Look in the mirror."

"Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow."

"Children don?t read ?genres?; they read stories. Below a certain age, they don?t distinguish between ?true? and ?not true,? because they see no reason that a white rabbit shouldn?t possess a pocket watch, that whales shouldn?t talk, or that sentient beings shouldn?t live on other planets and travel in spaceships. Science-fiction tropes aren?t read as ?science fiction?; they?re read as fiction. And fiction is read as reality. And sometimes reality lives under the bed and has very large teeth, and it?s no use pretending otherwise."

"Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world."

"Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or she?d get the giggles, a terrifying thought because the man might think you were laughing at him, at his dick, at its size, and that would be fatal."

"Cleverness is a quality a man liked to have in his wife so long as she is some distance away from him. Up close he'll take kindness, if there's nothing more alluring to be had."

"Confess: it?s my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don?t go out of my way to be scary."

"Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind."

"China does not exist. Nevertheless, she longs to be there."

"Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?"

"Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful."

"Dear Diplodicus; dear Pterosaur; dear Trilobite; dear Mastodon, dear Dodo, dear Great Auk, dear Passenger Pigeon, dear Panda, dear Whooping Crane; and all you countless others who have played in this our shared Garden in your day: be with us at this time of trial, and strengthen our resolve. Like you, we have enjoyed the air and the sunlight and the moonlight on the water; like you, we have heard the call of the seasons and have answered them. Like you, we have replenished the Earth. And like you, we must now witness the end of our Species, and pass from Earthly view. -Adam One"

"Death is much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say."

"Creating some god for one's inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not."

"Death makes me hungry. Maybe it's because I've been emptied; or maybe it's the body's way of seeing to it that I remain alive."

"Debt? that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force."

"Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all."

"Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that can be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right ? though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them."

"Do not let the bastards grind you down."

"Don?t interfere with false gods, you?ll get the gold paint all over your hands."

"Does feminist mean a large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it's the latter, so I sign up."

"Don't blame me, blame history, he says, smiling. Such things happen. Falling in love has been recorded, or at least those words have."

"Don't let the bastards grind you down."

"Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat."

"Each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing."

"Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others."

"Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with."

"Even sex was no longer what it had once been, though he was still as addicted to it as ever. He felt jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was merely an inconsequential knob that happened to be attached to one end of it. Maybe the thing would be happier if left to roam around on its own."

"Each thing is valid and really there. It is through a field of such valid objects that I must pick my way, every day and in every way. I put a lot of effort into making such distinctions. I need to make them. I need to be very clear, in my own mind."

"Even when there is no one."

"Either I'm alive or I'm dying, she said to Daniel. Please don't feel you can't tell me. Which is it?"

"Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother's love - the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through the jungle in the form of a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely."

"Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write ?The end.? A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire."

"Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom."

"Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted."

"Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were."

"Expectation isn't the same as desire."

"Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own."

"Everyone said he was a fool. Everyone said she was a clever woman. They used the word ensnare."

"Every time the women appear, Snowman is astonished all over again. They're every known color from the deepest black to whitest white, they're various heights, but each one of them is admirably proportioned. Each is sound of tooth, smooth of skin. No ripples of fat around their waists, no bulges, no dimpled orange-skin cellulite on their thighs. No body hair, no bushiness. They look like retouched fashion photos, or ads for a high priced workout program. Maybe this is the reason that these women arouse in Snowman not even the faintest stirrings of lust. It was the thumbprints of human imperfection that used to move him, the flaws in the design: the lopsided smile, the wart next to the navel, the mole, the bruise. These were the places he'd single out, putting his mouth on them. Was it consolation he'd had in mind, kissing the wound to make it better? There was always an element of melancholy involved in sex. After his indiscriminate adolescence he'd preferred sad women, delicate and breakable, women who'd been messed up and who needed him. He'd liked to comfort them, stroke them gently at first, reassure them. Make them happier, if only for a moment. Himself too, of course; that was the payoff. A grateful woman would go the extra mile. But these new women are neither lopsided nor sad: they're placid, like animated statues. They leave him chilled."

"Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer."

"Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar."

"Faith is only a word, embroidered."

"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time."

"Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear."

"Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered."

"Fear has a smell, as love does."

"Fear is synonymous with the future, and the future consists of forked roads, I should say forking roads, because the roads are forking all the time, like slow lightning."

"Feathers, he says. They ask this question at least once a week. He gives the same answer. Even over such a short time ? two months, three? He's lost count ? they've accumulated a stock of lore, of conjecture about him: Snowman was once a bird but he's forgotten how to fly and the rest of his feathers fell out, and so he is cold and he needs a second skin, and he has to wrap himself up. No: he's cold because he eats fish, and fish are cold. No: he wraps himself up because he's missing his man thing, and he doesn't want us to see. That's why he won't go swimming. Snowman has wrinkles because he once lived underwater and it wrinkled up his skin. Snowman is sad because the others like him flew away over the sea, and now he is all alone."