Quotes from Ethan Canin

Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live.

My idea of teaching literature is just to read great passages aloud or to look at it the way a writer does, which is what I try to do. Which is to say, 'How does this writer do this? How did he order his scenes? Do you notice any pattern to his sentences?'

One of the hallmarks of our politics now is that we tend to elect those who can campaign over those who can lead;

I've solved a problem that was thought to be unsolvable. . . . And I learned that only a small part of it is talent. The rest is determination. . . . The will is everything.

An infant, in his first sleepiness, must let go of the world; a man must learn to die. What comes between are the grains of sand. Ambition. Loss. Envy. Desire. Hatred. Love. Tenderness. Joy. Shame. Loneliness. Ecstasy. Ache. Surrender.

The forgotten of this country have a consistent history of turning on their champions, and I suppose the way working men and women have forsaken the very politicians who could help them most speaks of the primacy of emotion in politics. Perhaps the great decline of FDR's party, which was beginning in Henry Bonwiller's time, didn't come about because Democrats favored a logical argument over a moral one, but simply because they clung to the idea that either one mattered at all.

As soon as we conform anything to language, we've changed it. Use a word and you've altered the world. The poets know this. It's what they try so hard to avoid.

Does one grow wise in increments? By fractioning a life and then summing it? By stacking sand? An infant, in his first sleepiness, must let go of the world; a man must learn to die. What comes between are the grains of sand. Ambition. Loss. Envy. Desire. Hatred. Love. Tenderness. Joy. Shame. Loneliness. Ecstasy. Ache. Surrender. Live long enough and you will solve them all.

In people like us, the craving is as strong as the craving for food or water, the yearning for touch or light or love. I was looking for something--a diversion, an occupation, an unwavering force--that would elevate me, that would lift me out of the melancholy dissection of my own interior geography that otherwise would have consumed me pitilessly, as it had my father. I wanted to fly above myself-- if only for a few hours--and look down in tranquility upon my life.

People punch up," he said. "They punch the ones who are better than them. Nobody likes a kid who does something well. That

Optimism is an attempt to circumvent the truth.

THERE WERE AT least two ways to solve any problem: from the beginning, which was the usual approach; and from the end, which was not. Likewise, every theorem could be proved either directly, using incremental logic, or indirectly, by conjecturing the negative of the hypothesis and demonstrating a contradiction. Thus there were at least four permutations to choose from.

He was going to think about her and think about her until she disappeared.

When a great tree came down, the report could be heard for miles, a shifting crescendo of rustling and snapping as the trunk yanked away the limbs around it, culminating finally in a muffled thud like a sledgehammer striking moss.

Tycho Brahe clung to a lousy idea, Hans. That's all it was. People like us—you must know this by now—we can't do that. We know damn well when we're right. We know a long time before anyone else even suspects it." He cleared his throat. "Or when we're wrong. That's how we live. That's how we die.

like a woman in a ball gown sitting at a bus stop.

he was blindly ignorant of history and therefore did not fear his role in it

The field itself required a particular mode of thinking. Not merely the standard mathematical skills but a visual dexterity that could retain complex constructions in the mind for long periods of time, transforming certain parameters while leaving others intact. It was a strenuous and disobliging intellectual endeavor, a sea change of thought in which the brain performed multidimensional mapping.

There were topologists who could build architectural structures in their imaginations, then turn them over, then flip them inside out, then spin them around, then open them up and go inside them.

The connectors have gained the upper hand. We isolationists languish in the caves. Take

There's no answer that ends the search, you know. Obviously, there never will be. The artist seeks to capture the world because the nature of every single object is a mystery to him. The philosopher addresses human nature because he's a stranger to every part of it. It

I didn't answer. Mr. Dowater had a reputation for deadpan humor, a humor that was strangely similar to the low-level, sarcastic sniper fire offered by the school's underbleacher population of stoners and class-cutters. It didn't really pay to engage it. After

Happy isn't even a real idea, he said. It's just like love. A reasonably skeptical person doesn't even know what it means.

Is the sorrow of death the same as the sorrow of knowing the pain in a child's future? What about the melancholy of music? Is it the same as the melancholy of a summer dusk? Is the loss I was feeling for my father the same I would have felt for a man better-fit to the world, a man who might have thrown a baseball with me or taken me out in the mornings to fish? Both we call grief. I don't think we have words for our feelings any more than we have words for our thoughts.