Canada
by Richard Ford
(Bloomsbury, 2012)
Blaming your parents for your life’s difficulties finally leads nowhere.
p. 11
Everything didn’t have to have a practical outcome. Some things you only did because you liked doing
them.
p. 33
This is how she thought of things: as being imperfect, yet still acceptable.
p. 36
I’m intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
All the signs, the warnings we think we know about disaster are mostly
wrong.
p. 84.
Children get as good at pretending as adults.
p. 88
Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks
p. 98
Every situation in with human beings re involved cab be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don’t stay the way they are very ling.
p. 248
Life-changing events often don’t seem what they are.
p. 278
Loneliness, I’ve read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it’s promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.
P. 292
I could like it or hate it, but the world would change around me no matter how I felt.
p. 309
Life had begun to demand lies in order to be workable.
p. 342
Life’s passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.
p. 358
People do crazy things out of despair when their certainty fades.
p. 381
It was still my childish view that people belonged where I found them.
p. 385
Anything at all can follow anything at all.
p. 386
The only real difference between one place on the earth and another: how you think about the people, and the differences it makes to you to think that way.
p. 397
You always think you know the worst thing. But it’s never the very worst thing.
p. 420
It’s a mystery why we affiliate ourselves with the people we do, when all the signs say we shouldn’t.
p. 427
The opposite of everything obvious deserved full consideration. The opposite could turn out to be the truth.
p. 427
The prelude to very bad things can be ridiculous … but can also be casual and unremarkable. Which is worth recognizing, since it indicates where many bad events originate: from just an inch away from the everyday.
p. 442
The length of time you stayed in a place didn’t seem to count for much.
p. 444
That’s how human beings were, I thought - unattached to most of the things they said or felt.
p. 456
People sometimes speak and mistakenly believe they are the only ones listening. They speak only for their own ear, and forget that others hear them.
p. 461
Things made only of words and thoughts can become physical acts.
p. 463
Probably many people’s vision of “thinking something through” is of this nature: you do precisely what you want to do - if you can.
p. 474
Ideas about parting, in which kind formalities are observed all around, turn out to be an
exception in life rather than a rule.
p. 478
Teaching is a gesture of serial non-abandonment (of them), the vocation of a boy who loved school.
p. 484
Dying must make you thirst for knowledge. As well as other things.
p. 496
You have a better chance in life - of surviving it - if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate… to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.
p. 511