A Doubter's Almanac
Ethan Canin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Dawkins once said that he opposed religion mainly because it taught us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
“I've solved a problem that was thought to be unsolvable. . . . And I learned that only a small part of it is talent. The rest is determination. . . . The will is everything.”
“Are there not a thousand forms of sorrow? Is the sorrow of death the same as the sorrow of knowing the pain in a child's future? What about the melancholy of music? Is it the same as the melancholy of a summer dusk? Is the loss I was feeling for my father the same I would have felt for a man better-fit to the world, a man who might have thrown a baseball with me or taken me out in the mornings to fish? Both we call grief. I don't think we have words for our feelings any more than we have words for our thoughts.”
“An infant, in his first sleepiness, must let go of the world; a man must learn to die. What comes between are the grains of sand. Ambition. Loss. Envy. Desire. Hatred. Love. Tenderness. Joy. Shame. Loneliness. Ecstasy. Ache. Surrender.”
“Does one grow wise in increments? By fractioning a life and then summing it? By stacking sand? An infant, in his first sleepiness, must let go of the world; a man must learn to die. What comes between are the grains of sand. Ambition. Loss. Envy. Desire. Hatred. Love. Tenderness. Joy. Shame. Loneliness. Ecstasy. Ache. Surrender. Live long enough and you will solve them all.”
“As soon as we conform anything to language, we’ve changed it. Use a word and you’ve altered the world. The poets know this. It’s what they try so hard to avoid.”
“People punch up,” he said. “They punch the ones who are better than them. Nobody likes a kid who does something well. That”
“Optimism is an attempt to circumvent the truth.”
“My father peed like a horse. His urine lowed in one great sweeping dream that started suddenly and stopped just as suddenly, a single, winking arc of shimmering clarity that endured for a prodigious interval and then disappeared in an instant, as though the outflow were a solid object—and arch of glittering ice or a thick band of silver—and not (as it actually approximated) a parabolic, dynamically averaged graph of the interesting functions of gravity, air resistance, and initial velocity on a non-viscous fluid, produced and exhibited by a man who’d just consumed more than a gallon of midwestern beer. The flow was as clear as water. When it struck the edge of the gravel shoulder, the sound was like a bed-sheet being ripped. Beneath this high reverberation, he let out a protracted appreciative whistle that culminated in a tunneled gasp, his lips flapping at the close like a trumpeters. In the tiny topsoil, a gap appeared, a wisp entirely unashamed. Bernie bumped about in the cargo bay. My father moved up close to peer through the windshield, zipping his trousers and smiling through the glass at my mother. I realized that the yellow that should have been in his urine was unmistakable now in his eyes. ‘’Thank goodness,’’ my mother said when the car door closed again. ‘’I was getting a little bored in here.”
“It happens.” He turned again to the garden. “To the brain, I mean. It’s the drink, naturally. And the hepatic function. But there is clearly something else occurring, too. Certainly in other men I’ve seen it. There is something in certain abilities that is never far from—far from—” He looked out at the lake. “I cannot really know.” “No, please go on.” “Far from terror, perhaps. It is not such a rare phenomenon, you see. I used to encounter it around the maths division when I was at university, and I have seen it here, even, in my little country practice. It seems to be quite primal. At its crudest, it is a bona fide paranoia. Plenty in the field are gone before the age of twenty. I’ve seen that, too. Perhaps it is a harbinger. I believe it to be physiological.” He looked down. “I sometimes imagine it as God’s revenge.” “Against mathematicians?” “One must bear in mind that they might be considered spies.” He was smiling now. “By the Deity, you mean?” “Indeed. Your dad’s cantankerous nature, by the way—you know that this is his liver, too, don’t you? And of course the drink plays a part in it—but it is also the man himself. The emotions are ablaze in him.” He set down the bucket. “For people like you and me—well, we are shielded by all our damping circuitry. We maintain a cushion against the world, if you will. A comfort against the ravage. But I believe it is not so for him.” He regarded me. “Think of what life must be like for a mind like your father’s. I mean, human existence is bounded by tragedy, is it not? And shot through with it, as well. I was born in Lahore, so I know this in a particular way. But your father, too—he knows it just as particularly, in his own way. I have learned to keep such thoughts somewhat at bay. And so have you. But for him, there is no ignoring it. There is no joy in God’s creation. No pleasure in sunlight or water. No pleasure in a good meal. There is no pleasure in the company of friends. There is nothing. Nothing that might assuage the maw. He”
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