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Canlit Quotes

Browse 13 quotes about Canlit.

Canlit Quotes

“It used to be that you could get a lot of recognition by writing about Canada, as long as it was about small towns and nature.' 'Really?' 'Yeah. You could have canoes and the prairies or, also, sad women, very sad women who were fat or whose husbands had left them or something. There was a lady who wrote about fucking a bear, which was like a union with the land. There was a lady who wrote about mystical experiences she had at a cottage in northern Ontario. I was never sure what that was about. They were very important at one time, very stern and important. I had to study them in school. Anyway, he was one of them. He concentrated on the prairies, with a lot of native names, and wise native people, like there's a young boy with an Ojibway grandmother who will teach him the ways of the forest, sort of thing, and there's a lot of history, like a lot of the Riel rebellion for example.' 'The what?' 'History. And there's a lot of disaster, on the prairies, like people having to rebuild their sod houses after floods and so on.' They drove on the humming highway for a while. Then Nicola said, 'So you haven't answered my question.' 'What question?' 'Do you think he's any good?' 'Oh. The thing is... it's not, it doesn't matter. It's important. So it doesn't matter if I think it's good or not.' 'Okay. So it doesn't matter. So I'm asking you. What you think. Do. You. Think. It's. Good.' She slapped her bare thigh. James paused for a long moment... He said, 'There's one Boben book, I think it's Cold Season, or maybe it's Comfort of Winter, which ends with the line, "a story which Canadians must never tire of telling." What do you think of that line? A story which Canadians must never tire of telling.' She shrugged. 'I have no idea.' 'I'll tell you what you think of it. You don't give a shit. I'll tell you what I think of it. I don't give a shit either. But I also think it's the worst bullshit I've ever heard. I think,' he said, accelerating, 'that Ludwig Boben is a fucking asshole.”

AssholesCanlitBullshit Lit
Book:Noise
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“The question, then, is not whether boy should meet girl in Winnipeg or in New York; instead it is, What happens in Canadian literature when boy meets girl? And what sort of boy, and what sort of girl? If you've got this far, you may predict that when boy meets girl she gets cancer and he gets hit by a meteorite. . . .”

HumourousCanlitUniversal ThemesCanadian Tradition
Book:Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
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“We didn’t talk much. The things I’d needed to say before didn’t matter anymore and what mattered now was too hard to hear. So Jamie didn’t tell me he’d be gone before Christmas, or that I was the first girl he ever loved. I didn’t tell him I had wanted it to be him all along, or that he was my first everything. Instead, we sat shivering and holding hands, and let ourselves believe we were lucky just a little while longer.”

Coming Of Age1970sCanlit
Book:Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit
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