‘With your education, you could have been a doctor,’ Mona said.
‘It’s true,’ she said to Emily.
‘But I’m a writer,’ I said. ‘How many doctors has Canada got — thousands. How many writers? A handful. It’s easier to be a doctor than a writer..’
– Norman Levine
“Why Do You Live So Far Away?”
Published in Champagne Barn (Penguin Books, 1984)
“…what has succeeded the last age of empire is a new age of violence. The key narrative of the new world order is the disintegration of nation states into ethnic civil war; the key architects of that order are warlords; and the key language of our age is ethnic nationalism.”
Blood and Belonging (Toronto: Viking, 1993), p. 2
“Nationalists are supremely sentimental. Kitcsch is the natural aesthetic of an ethnic ‘cleanser’. Ther eis no killer on either side of the checkpoints who will not pause, between firing at his enemies, to sing a nostalgic song or even recite a few lines of some ethnic epic. The latent purpose of such sentimentality is to imply that one is in the grip of a love greater than reason, stronger than the will, a love akin to fate and destiny. Such a love assists the belief that it is fate, however tragic, which obliges you to kill.”
ibid., p. 6
…[Massolin argues that Toryism] exalted the British connection not simply as a political link but as a set of moral virtues that exalted English Canada above the United States, and enabled Canada to develop as an autonomous community in North America. Finally, argues the author, Canadian Tories were eclectic and selective in borrowing conservative ideas.”
Michael Gauvreau, “Review of Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939–1970” in History of Intellectural Culture, 2005, Vol. 5, No. 1.
One Liberal described R.B. Bennett this way:
“He has the manners of a Chicago policeman and the temperament of a Hollywood
film star.”
Berton, The Great Depression, p 132
What a responsibility we bear, in this fat country of ours! Think what America could mean to the world. Then see what it is. What a breed it might have produced. But look at us — at you, at me. Read the paper, if you can bear to.
Herzog London: Penguin Books, 1964, p. 34
“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”
Jane Austen in a letter quoted in Diane Johnson’s review of several books about Austen in the New York Review of Books, June 23, 2005 (p. 22)
Not the least of the ironies that lie behind this deeply serious and thoughtful book is that perhaps the greatest philosopher the Indian subcontinent has ever produced is increasingly fashionable in India because he is regarded as an icon of the West.
– Pico Iyer, “The Buddha’s cure: A Review of An End To Suffering: The Buddha in the World by Pankaj Mishra” in The New York Review of Books, March 10, 2005, p. 4
The West, for those far away, means a haven of modern thinking, reason, and clear-headedness, qualities not always apparent at home, and a refuge from ritualism and superstition; those who long for it are Occidentalists in a hopeful sense. And though such admirers are to be found in every traditional or impoverished culture, they are especially conspicuous in countries such as India, where centures of British rule have left many people thinking of London or Oxford as the natural culmination of their ambitions, social or intellectual.
– Pico Iyer, “The Buddha’s cure: A Review of An End To Suffering: The Buddha in the World by Pankaj Mishra” in The New York Review of Books, March 10, 2005, p. 4
There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispasstionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from teh fringe to influence the seats of power. We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable solutions …
What does this mean for public policy and the environment? Listen to John Hagee, posator of the 17,000–member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, who is quoted in Rossings’s book as syaing, “Mark it down, take it to heart, and comfort one another with these words. Doomsday is coming for the earth, for the antions, and for individuals, but those who have trusted in Jesus will not be present on earth to witness the dire time of tribulation.” Rossing sums up the message in five words that she says are basic Rapture credo: “The world cannot be saved.” It leads to “appalling ethics”, she reasons, because the faithful are relieved of concern for the environment, violence, and everything else except their personal salvation. The earth suffers the same fate as the unsaved. All are destroyed.
– Bill Moyers, “Welcome to Doomsday”, The New York Review of Books, March 24, 2005
The West, for those far away, means a haven of modern thinking, reason, and clear-headedness, qualities not always apparent at home, and a refuge from ritualism and superstition; those who long for it are Occidentalists in a hopeful sense. And thought such admirers are to be found in every traditional or impoverished culture, they are especially conspicuous in countries such as India, where centuries of British rule have left many people thinking of London or Oxford as the natural culmination of their ambitions, social or intellectual.
– “The Buddha’s Cure: Review of An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World by Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books, March 10, 2005