“But nothing is ever really fixed. Michael’s father once told him about entropy and he never forgot. Something that depressing is hard to forget. Everything is eroding; people slow it down by fixing their cars and fixing their love lives and fixing their bodies, but in the end, it all falls apart anyway.”
-Brett Savory – In and Down (Brindle & Glass, 2007)
“I know my thoughts are irrational, even as I think them, but thoughts are not by nature rational, and my mind isn’t tame.”
-Marianne Paul – Becoming Animal (Canadian Tales of the Fantastic)
“To minds that crave binary order, and the simplicity of the male-female dichotomy, the study of gender can lead to despair. They say that women with Y chromosomes and men with two X’s are abnormal. But normal is just a word that gets thrown around when we try to make sense of biology.”
-Scott Fotheringham – The Rest is Silence (Goose Lane Editions, 2012)
“I made no distinction between history of mythology. Troy and Gilgamesh, for example, cross-references to both historical and mythological entries. Bored and restless and wanting to believe anything that would stimulate me, I was more than happy to accept that these often contradictory readings of the past were all equally true, that reality was not flat and linear, but complex and multidimensional, allowing for many versions of the same events to exist simultaneously. For many pasts to lead to the same present.”
-Claude Lalumiere – The Door to Lost Pages (ChiZine Publications, 2011)
“’Ragnarok.’ Even ignorant of the word’s meaning, it held weight, inevitability.”
-Chadwick Ginther –Thunder Road (RavenStone, 2012).
“There’s something about this area – the lake and the land around it – that’s like a haven. I’m not hiding from the skyscrapers and parking lots and the craziness of the rest of the world by living here year round. I’m just, like, getting closer to the real world.”
-Charles de Lint – Mulengro (Orb 2003)
“Walking through your fear makes you stronger. It makes you able to walk through other fears. It gives you courage. It gives you faith that there are bigger powers in the world than you fear. When you walk through fear, you… become a bigger power than the fear. It is its own medicine in the end.”
-Richard Wagamese – Him Standing (Raven Books, 2013)
“”These days, I can quantify my remaining decades. I can measure them out in life-events. I can gauge my value as a man by who I’ve loved, who has loved me, and by the ones I didn’t love nearly enough.”
-Michael Rowe, “Ghosts” (Postscripts to Darkness, http://pstdarkness.com/2014/08/08/ghosts-by-michael-rowe/ )
“That they should envision themselves greater than nature, that they believe they can control eventualities with their industries both amazes and amuses you, the latter in a grim way. You survey the skyline of London, blotted with inky smoke from their factories, fumes that choke the air, and you wonder: are they insane? They cannot breathe. They die of illnesses brought about by their own wicked habits, and yet they place such childish faith in science”
-Nancy Kilpatrick – Berserker (in Vampyric Variations)
“Dear One, beware the poison of hatred. Hatred ends not by hatred. Dear One, beware for hatred ends only by letting it go.”
-Graeme MacQueen – “Fate and Fortune” in The Monkey King & Other Stories Edited by Griffin Ondaatje (Harper Collins, 1995)
Speculating Canada: Canadian Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy 