You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
A realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.
Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.
Sitting in an office for TOO long is not natural, perhaps, so that’s why we should change it. I didn’t say that out-and-out capitalism, which reduces humanity to dollar figures, is natural.
We think we live in a global village. We don’t. The world is a big and beautiful and incredibly varied place. It can only be known locally, with your two feet on the ground. We should stick to our own gardens, as Voltaire said.
Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness – how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I’ve got!
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.
Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
It is a vast country, so that inspires you. It’s also the greatest hotel on earth: It welcomes people from everywhere. It’s a good country to write from because in many ways Canada is the world.
I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.
I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.
If there’s only one nation in the sky, shouldn’t all passports be valid for it?
The animals might embody certain traits. We think of tigers as being ferocious, etc. But to my mind, it was the other way around: the humans embodied certain animal traits.
Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.
At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.
Why can’t reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there’s so little fish to catch?