Quotes from Guy Vanderhaeghe

A man descending is propelled by inertia; the only initiative left him is whether or not he decides to enjoy the passing scene.

The Wars is a great book, rich in its images, its language, its construction, and, ultimately, its conception.

History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.

History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.

I've always found that a really lively argument depends on the ignorance of the combatants.

Sometimes I feel entirely disassociated from what I do. It's a malady of the modern age.

A man descending is propelled by inertia; the only initiative left him is whether or not he decides to enjoy the passing scene.

It might be high summer all about but inside me everything is fall. The lonesomeness of a sad, slow closing of days, knowing frost is nigh and wind needling through the cabin chinks is just around the bend. That's me, right now.

As long as I can remember I have been carelessly casting myself uninvited into novels where no self-respecting novelist would have me. This literary gate-crashing of mine must be a sign of a wretched thirsting after immortality.

Embrace one another with courage. Search each other's hearts for hidden suffering and never flee what you discover! That's the ticket!

my longing was for Russia...Not Soviet Russia. But nineteenth-century Russia, the Russia of Dostoevsky's saintly prostitutes and Alyosha; of Tolstoy's Pierre; and Aksionov, the sufferer in God Sees the Truth But Waits. A country where the characters in books were allowed to ask one another the questions: How must I live to be happy? What is goodness? Why does man suffer? What is to be done?

But there was also the shame of a man who suddenly discovers that all his lies were transparent, and everything he thought so safely hidden had always been in plain view. He had been living one of those dreams. The kind of dream in which you are walking down the street, meeting friends and neighbours, smiling and nodding, and when you arrive at home an pass a mirror you see for the first time that you are stark naked.

They teach us that in school, matters of principle. I swear it's a plot to get us all slaughtered the day they graduate us out the door. It's their revenge, see? Here we are reading books in literature class about some banana who's only got one oar in the water to start with, and then he pops it out worrying about principles.

Of course, I could holler Religious Persecution. Not that it would do any good. But it's something I happen to know quite a bit about, seeing as Religious Persecution was my assignment in Social Studies that time we studied Man's Inhumanity to Man. The idea was to write a two-thousand-word report proving how everybody has been a shit to everybody else through the ages, and where did it ever get them? This is supposed to improve us somehow, I guess.

Most of those characters with all the answers couldn't poor piss out of a rubber boot if they read the instructions printed on the sole.

He had the neurotic's partial vision of life, and a sense of the absurdity which adheres to all effort when observed in the light of a long enough perspective. This had never made him popular.

His life, like every other life, could be graphed: an ascent that rises to a peak, pauses at a particular node, and then descends. Only the gradient changes in any particular case: this child's was steeper than most, his descent swifter. We all ripen. We are all bound by the same ineluctable law, the same mathematical certainty.

Not to do as the child wishes would be wrong because he is born on a path, and it would be evil, a crime against nature to make him deny his spirit.

The fact remains, I was never meant to sell china. Only truly saintly men are cut out for that; the sort of men who trudge the roads to Benares, or reside on the icy hilltops speculating on infinity. It takes more faith than I can summon.

One look at Scott was enough to tell you that the twig between his legs hadn't had its bark peeled back in a coon's age. Mr. Secretary ought to read Surgeon Kittson's annual

One look at Scott was enough to tell you that the twig between his legs hadn't had its bark peeled back in a coon's age.

In some way, you help me settle for what is . I come in the door in the evening and I think, I'm going to eat supper with someone who's going to make eating supper an occasion. And that's not a small matter.

You carried the past into the future on your back, its knees and arms hugging you tighter with every step.

What's the point of knocking yourself out for anybody but yourself? The answer was obvious. There wasn't any.