Quotes from Will Ferguson

The two most important phrases in the human language are "If only" and "Maybe someday". Our past mistakes and our unrequited longings. The things we regret and the things we yearn for. That's what makes us who we are.

Many Canadian nationalists harbour the bizarre fear that should we ever reject royalty, we would instantly mutate into Americans, as though the Canadian sense of self is so frail and delicate a bud, that the only thing stopping it from being swallowed whole by the US is an English lady in a funny hat.

Obviously, he needed to kill Bubba, but how? The man was a trained prison guard twice his size. The tax auditors had been easy. Mr. Ethics had slapped them to death with their own attaché cases. And even then, his neighbours had chipped in to help him hide the bodies. "A tax auditor, you say? No problem. Let me get my spade.

As a parent, my fear is that when we die, we'll have to watch all those moments in our lives when we were short tempered with our children, all the times they needed our love and we didn't give it, all those times we were distracted or in a bad mood, and all the times we were angry or impatient. My fear is that when the time comes, I'll have to watch all those moments again. That they'll make us watch them before we can get into Heaven

Human nature, at its best, had always been based on a deep heroic restlessness, on wanting something--something else, something more, whether it be true love or a glimpse just beyond the horizon. It was the promise of happiness, not the attainment of it, that had driven the entire engine, the folly and glory of who we are.

The great themes of Canadian history are as follows: Keeping the Americans out, keeping the French in, and trying to get the Natives to somehow disappear.

People don't listen to karaoke, they endure it until it is their turn. It is the singularly most self-indulgent form of entertainment available.

You ever want to negotiate a hostage situation in Quebec, I'm your man. Send me in for a little parley and the francophone miscreants will flee, hands over bleeding ears.

Hellraisers destroy only themselves, and they do it because they love life too much to fall asleep.

when you are constantly prevailing upon the kindness of strangers-as a hitchhiker must-it keeps you in a positive frame of mind. Call it Zen and the Art of Hitchhiking. The Way of the Lift. The chrysanthemum and the Thumb. Heady on beer and the sound of my own voice, the aphorisms spilled out unchecked.

Deferring judgement to a later date resolves nothing and all you are left with is a box of jumbled slides and a collection of knick-knacks and odds and ends. Here a face. There a sunset.

Despair comes slowly, crawling its way up inside you until it threatens to overwhelm everything; it buckles the knees, makes you falter, makes you break your stride. In those moments she would will herself forward until despair was replaced by something stronger.

Fear of death and the desire to live on, somehow, if only through our children. Or our grandchildren. Quixotic quest for immortality. It's sad and heroic and doomed - all at the same time.

You know, kid, ethics isn't about choosing between right and wrong; it's about choosing between grey and grey. It's about choosing between two equally desirable but mutually exclusive courses of action. Freedom or security? Courage or comfort? Self-examination or blissful happiness? Column A or Column B?

The human memory is a salamander; it squiggles from point to point, slaloms its way improbably up walls and across ceilings.

More polar bears live in Canada than in the rest of the world combined, which raises the question, Why the hell did we choose the beaver as our national emblem? We could have had Nanuk of the North, Lord of the Arctic, as our symbol. Instead we got stuck with Squirrelly McTeeth. Sheesh.

What?" "I said, Are you dangerous?" I wasn't sure I heard her correctly. "Who? me? No, I'm not dangerous at all." "You promise?" "Sure." "All right, then," she said. "You can get in." And that was how I met the unsinkable, irrepressible, wholly undeniable Kikumi Otsugi, a woman who believed in bad men, but not bad dishonest men. I had given her my word of honor that I would not harm her, and she was satisfied.

There, stacked high on his desk, was a tower of paper. Thick slabs of manuscript. Slush. Unsolicited, unagented, unloved. This was where dreams came to die. Book proposals, cover letters, entire manuscripts – they gathered like so much detritus on the desks of publishers everywhere.

To charakterystyczna cecha cywilizacji: niechciane,niezamawiane marzenia

Storms without rain. Winds without water. She woke, and when she sat up, the dust fountained off her and the voice that accompanied her once again stirred, once again whispered, "Get up. Keep walking. Don't stop.

I speak Japanese the way a bear dances. It's not that the bear dances well that impresses people, it's the fact the bear dances at all.)

The grander the name, the blander the dame.

The sun rises on Newfoundland, sets on British Columbia, island to island. Chilly Atlantic mornings and warm Pacific sunsets. An arc that traces a path from the dawn of an empire to its twilight.

and debris, and her husband and I settled back, sucking on toothpicks like a pair of feudal lords. This may sound sexist and insensitive and politically incorrect—and it is—but I had long since