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"The love of your own country is a terrible curse, my friend," he says. "Especially a country like this one. It is much easier to live in someone else's country. Then you are not tempted." "Tempted?" says Rennie. "To change things," he says.

Margaret Atwood, Bodily Harm

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And all the time these clouds of silent words surround them, stunned broad, dog, bag, and bitch, pointing at them, reducing them, cutting them down to size so they can be handled. The trick with these silent words is to walk in the spaces between them, turn sideways in your head, evade. Like walking through walls.

Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

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The Purpose of a liberal-arts education was not to train but to free the mind.  It didn't matter what you did for a living; the important thing was the kind of person you were.

Richard Yates, Easter Parade

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Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

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"In Ireland," said the red-haired Irishman, "I have a home but I have no money.  Here I have lots of money but I have no home."

Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief

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Poor Canada, destined always to be on the edge of things, inimical to books and writing, plagues by insects in the summer and ice in the winter, populated by the sons and daughters of ambitious, narrow, pious, impecunious Protestants and inarticulate but lusty Catholic tennis players, not to mention the rest of the riff-riff on the expedition, drawn, by the King's order, from the prisons of Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Rouen and Dijon -  thieves, abortionists, frauds, panders, whores, footpads, assassins, along with the destitute and the witless, veery kind of rogue except heretics, traitors and counterfeiters who were deemed unsuitable to the dignity of our pious enterprise.

Douglas Glover, Elle

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Elle by Douglas Glover

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Publishers! You must bring this back into print, The Total Banana is for everyone!

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I am reminded of the mysterious beauty of Canada, peace just beyond the ambit of human squalor, silence split by the call of a bird or the cry of a wolf, the antiseptic and ghostly whiteness when winter comes.

Douglas Glover, Elle

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There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses

Helen MacDonald, H Is For Hawk

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Those books one hasn’t got around to reading- and of course those are the books one isn’t ever going to get around to reading.

John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley

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Galleries are too much like churches, there's too much reverence, you feel there should be some genuflecting going on. Also I don't like it that this is where paintings end up, on these neutral-toned walls with the track lighting, sterilized, rendered safe and acceptable. It's as if somebody's been around spraying the paintings with air freshener, to kill the smell. The smell of blood on the wall.

Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye