There are so many impatient people in the world. It seems everyone wants something right this second. We don't want to wait in lines, we get fidgety when our food takes too long to cook, and we have no tolerance whatsoever for anyone who holds us up from doing anything we want to do the moment we want to do it. I'm bothered right now that I'm having to wait till the end of this sentence to see what word I end up on. On, who knew? It's particularly hard to wait for things that are days or weeks or even months away. Calendars mock you, clocks pester you, and the rotation of the Earth seems to slow by at least 40 percent. I suppose, however, that if you were preparing to take over the world and you needed one final piece to fall into place, but that piece had to be slowly dragged over the dirt so that it didn't die, that would be really hard to wait for. I'd feel sorry for whoever that happened to, but then again they were trying to take over the world and all.
- from "Chapter Four: Look at Me, I'm a Chapter Heading" in Leven Thumps and the Wrath of Ezra by Obert Skye

He was setting back in a swivel chair in front of a rolltop desk and he had him a dime novel he was reading. It was about some daredevil who kept rescuing fair maidens from Indians or whatever. What the fair maiden was doing where she was always puzzled me, and I was never so lucky. Most of the maidens I came upon were most unfair.
- from The Proving Trail by Louis L'Amour

I'm wondering whether a similar fixation on erotic outrageousness isn't also a running theme in Canadian literature: after all, the Governor General's Award has twice been given to novels that feature a woman having sex with a bear (Marian Engel's Bear and Douglas Glover's Elle).
- from "Sex, Prose, and the Veggie Aisle" by Jeet Heer | The Walrus Blog

[We] trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up the gold and rebury it in vaults somewhere else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting Bull; harvest wave after wave of immigrants' dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their way; plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean; ship out the wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; drill the oil and natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers and springs, deep-drill for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats. And in return we condense unimaginable amounts of treasure into weapons buried beneath the land which so much treasure came from--weapons for which our best hope might be that we will someday take them apart and throw them away, and for which our next-best hope certainly is that they remain humming away under the prairie, absorbing fear and maintenance, unused, forever.
- from Great Plains by Ian Frazier

Arzach is a strangely garbed, yellow-faced, cone-headed man, astride a huge pterodactyl-like bird.
- from "Flying to the Moon in French and American Science Fiction" by Danièle Chatelain and George Slusser

The hand of man is now too slow for the demons of his curiosity, but the power of steam comes to his assistance.
- Charles Babbage

In the first years of the twenty-first century, Canadians seem to have rediscovered their North. A combination of battles over sovereignty, the race for northern resources, and the daunting prospect of an Arctic stripped of much of its summer ice cover by global warming has put the Arctic back on the national agenda. What makes the matter particularly compelling is that the United States is involved one way or another in all these issues, so that they have become intermingled with the neurotic anti-Americanism that is the evil twin of Canadian nationalism.
- from "The New North in Canadian History and Historiography" by Kenneth S. Coates and William R. Morrison

Nevertheless, for all its power to affect beliefs and circumstances, class stratification did not supersede sex stratification. The routine assignment of women to the classes of their husbands and fathers by contemporaries and social scientists has reflected women's subordination within patriarchal society and the fact of their primary identification by sex. Yet, since no model of social stratification exists that takes into account both the relationship of women and men within the family and the results of the unequal ownership of the means of production, there is no easy alternative to identifying wives and husbands as members of the same class. Thus, while class designation may sometimes be useful, it remains a fundamentally imperfect method of indicating a woman's relationship to a capitalist male hierarchy. Accordingly, in this volume, the terms "working class" and "middle class" should be regarded as a guide to the status and power of women's families rather than as a reliable measure of women's ability to command resources or to share in full the values of male capitalist society.
- from The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Woman in English Canada, 1919-1939 by Veronica Strong-Boag

There are times in life when the fancy words and pretty actions don't count for much, when it's blood and dust and death and a cold wind blowing and a gun in the hand and you know suddenly you're just an animal with guts and blood that wants to live, love and mate, and die in your own good time.
- from Radigan by Louis L'Amour

I suppose there must exist societies where food and excrement are not categorically opposed.
- from The Apotheosis of Captain Cook by Gananath Obeyesekere

Fish culture had become a North American panacea.
- Joseph E. Taylor III

May not historians ask, however, why it should be their task to spend long years disproving ideas thought up by sociologists in their baths? Do historians want to be the empirical foot soldiers commanded about by a bunch of sociological colonels?
- Peter Baldwin in Comparison and History

Each of the planet's cultures is a unique answer to the question of what it means to be human.
- Wade Davis

Hurrah for the law of Supply and Demand,
That regulates everything in the land,
The rate of wages, the price of stocks,
And the size of the Vanderbilt pile of "rocks."

It keeps in subjection the dull Labor hordes,
It fills up the chests of our great money lords,
And when for just reasons they're brought to a stand,
They've only to answer, "Supply and Demand."
- John McCormick

I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.
- Charles Schwab

Yonder he goes, with steady tread,
Toiling for his daily bread,
While the city is hushed,
Sleeves unrolled and cheeks health-flushed;
O! the strong mechanic!
The sinewy-armed mechanic!
- Mary A. Denison

The point of new historical investigation is to disrupt the notion of fixity, to discover the nature of the debate or repression that leads to the appearance of timeless permanence in binary gender representation.
- from "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" by Joan Scott in American Historical Review

Compassion is the vice of queens, Mamma always says, and she thinks I should toughen up. She says that I let the dogs take advantage of me and hog the bed, when they should sleep on the floor, and that I give too much of my pocket money to beggars, and that if I am to get along in this world, I need to harden my heart.

Well, I don't want my heart to be hard, and even if I end up like Poppy, trying to drink my heart to death, or like Mamma, trying to work my heart to death, at least I will know that I have a heart and I used it honestly.
- from Flora Segunda by Ysabeau S. Wilce

So their lives go round, year after year, decade after decade, in a ritualistic cycle of pig-raising, pig-slaughtering, dancing, feasting, and warring.
- from "Doing Environmental History" by Donald Worster, in Canadian Environmental History, ed. David Freeland Duke

To oppose something is to maintain it.

They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

...

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

- from The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin