Choice of evils debates always produce extremism – people choose what they hope is the lesser evil, then call it good and demonize the other choice. It will be a challenge for your generation to synthesize – to move beyond Us versus Them, to We.
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.
As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‘Where did we come from, what happens next?’ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.
If you’re put on a pedestal, you’re supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.
Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.
Fear has a smell, as love does.
A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.
I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.
You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.
Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.
Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera – or an NHL game.
When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges – on gifts, trades, loans – and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
Marshall McLuhan is absolutely right, we are always looking in the rear view mirror.
I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.
About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
Love is the pursuit of shadows...
Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it; it went over you and you came out flat.
I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.