History tells us what people do; hi... - Guy Vanderhaeghe - Quotes.Pub

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

History Quotes / Historical fiction Quotes Writing Quotes

Guy Vanderhaeghe Quotes

That's the wonderful thing about one's thirties...Almost anything can surface. Old radical friends - and you and I can think of a number - emigrate to the suburbs, build two-car attached garages, take their daughters for lessons in bourgeois dance, and coach competitive sport. One the other hand we find the individual who decides he doesn't care what Granny or Aunt Edna thinks. He says to himself, 'There it is. I'm queer, queer as the day is long. I'm going to prance and wear satin pants until I'm eighty. I don't care.' Admirable.

My Present Age Quotes

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.

Fate Quotes / Children Quotes Queer Quotes The Last Crossing Quotes Two spirits Quotes

She'd whisper to me to take my tiny piece of happiness, hold its honey in my mouth until it melts away.

Happiness Quotes / Optimism Quotes Positivity Quotes The Last Crossing Quotes

Do not follow your present course. It is a dead end. The dead end of the perfect English gentleman.

The Last Crossing Quotes

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

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

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.

My Present Age Quotes

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.

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

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.

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

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.

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

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.

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

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.

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

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.

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

I remember you organized the big laundry party and all of our friends took their dirty clothes to the laundromat and drank wine out of a wineskin until the manager threw us out because you kept yelling that there ought to be a prize given to the owner of the biggest pair of boxer shorts.

My Present Age Quotes

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

My Present Age Quotes

It is in the face of all this visual chaos, so opposed to order and simplicity, that I suddenly, perhaps a little guiltily, recall my vow to simplify my life. When I made that promise I had in mind the image of the ancient Greek subsisting on a fragment of pungent cheese, coarse bread, a handful of sun-warmed olives, a little watered wine; a man who discussed the Good, the True, the Beautiful with grave delight, and piped clear music in a sylvan glade. But I feel the absence of hills clothed in myrtle and thyme; of the Great Mother, Homer's wine-dark sea. Good resolutions, it seems, require good scenery.

My Present Age Quotes

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.

My Present Age Quotes

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.

Endings Quotes Fall Quotes Melancholy Quotes The Last Crossing Quotes

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

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

This is the life I lead by day. But on a deeper level of consciousness I lead a different life. There, an insistent, persistent, hidden voice has been saying for years: No, no, this is not it! Some other kind of will in me turns away in misery and distaste from all of culture, from all that is being said and done around me. It finds all this tedious and vain, like a struggle of phantoms flailing away in a void; it seems to know another world, to foresee a different life, not yet to be found on earth but which will come and cannot fail to come, for only then will true reality be achieved. To me this voice is the voice of my real self. I live like a foreigner acclimatized in an alien land; the natives like me and I like them. I diligently work for their good, share their sorrows and rejoice in their joys, but at the same time I know that I am a stranger, I secretly long for the fields of my homeland, for its different spring, the smell of its flowers, and the way its women speak. Where is my homeland? I shall never see it, I shall die in foreign parts.

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

...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?

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

He said there were two kinds of bitterness: one that takes away the appetite and one that stimulates it. Pepper, he said, was of the first kind - it burns the tongue and nothing more. But horse-radish, though bitter, sharpens the hunger and makes a man impatient for the good things of the meal. So, he said, if a man becomes only bitter and downcast he goes no further. But a little bitterness, a little horse-radish, may give one an appetite for perfection."How quaint," said Ogle, "how undeniably folksy.

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

News of the disaster at Little Bighorn reached the Eastern Seaboard shortly after July 4, and not just any ordinary July 4 but the grand celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Republic. A country feeling its oats, flexing its muscles, vigorous and rich, cocksure and confident, has seen the impossible happen, the unthinkable become fact. Sitting Bull has spoiled their glorious Centennial, pissed on Custer's golden head, the head of a genuine Civil War hero, the head of someone who has recently been touted as a future President of the United States. Somehow a wedding and a funeral got booked for the same hour in the same church.

A Good Man Quotes Colonel custer Quotes Sitting Bull Quotes

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

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

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

Man Descending: Selected Stories Quotes

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