Quotes from Hugh MacLennan

The farmer's way of saving money: to be owed by someone he trusted.

Love, sought as an escape from the burden of the self, turns rapidly into a captivity.

The Greeks, who knew everything, understood that without the orgy there is no middle ground between bedlam and Toronto ... we need the healing grace of the orgy in this country.

The Ottawa river flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Man is a thinking animal, a talking animal, a toolmaking animal, a building animal, a political animal, a fantasizing animal. But, in the twilight of a civilization he is chiefly a taxpaying animal.

The Socialists can scheme their schemes and the Liberals can dream their dreams, but we, at least, have work to do.

An artist has to take life as he finds it. Life by itself is formless wherever it is. Art must give it form.

There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.

Wise Penelope! That's was Odysseus said to his wife when he got home. I don't think he ever told her he loved her. He probably knew the words would sound too small.

Happiness annihilates time.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

He sat down again. He wanted her body, even though there were plenty of other bodies he could have. Which meant, I suppose, that he wanted her body to want his. It would have been beneath his intellectual dignity to admit that he also wanted her soul to like his own soul.

Love, sought as an escape from the burden of the self, turns rapidly into a captivity.

Marx is only half right when he calls religion the opium of the people. It may turn a lot of people into sheep, but it turns far too many of them into tigers.

Death suddenly seemed unimportant and life seemed everything

we have discovered a great social secret in Canada. We have contrived to solve problems which would ruin other countries merely by ignoring their existence.

Timothy's eyes followed the straight back, the high shoulders, and the crisp white hair out of the door and out of his life -- a man, so he was to write years later, the like of whom he was never to met again, "because he was the only man I ever knew who could use words like honour, duty, and responsibility without making me feel like throwing up."

that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.

People talk of calf-love with wistful disdain, but mine was as intense as any emotion I knew until I crossed the frontier, years later, when I discovered that all loving is a loving of life in the midst of death.

This campus was an island of quiet in the city's roar, and at night it was an island of dark in the city's blaze.

I don't think he ever told her he loved her. He probably knew the words would sound too small.