Man Descending Quotes

“I've always found that a really lively argument depends on the ignorance of the combatants.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories

“Sometimes I feel entirely disassociated from what I do. It's a malady of the modern age.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories

“He said there were two kinds of bitterness: one that takes away the appetite and one that stimulates it. Pepper, he said, was of the first kind - it burns the tongue and nothing more. But horse-radish, though bitter, sharpens the hunger and makes a man impatient for the good things of the meal. So, he said, if a man becomes only bitter and downcast he goes no further. But a little bitterness, a little horse-radish, may give one an appetite for perfection.
"How quaint," said Ogle, "how undeniably folksy.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories

“A man descending is propelled by inertia; the only initiative left him is whether or not he decides to enjoy the passing scene.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories

“This is the life I lead by day. But on a deeper level of consciousness I lead a different life. There, an insistent, persistent, hidden voice has been saying for years: No, no, this is not it! Some other kind of will in me turns away in misery and distaste from all of culture, from all that is being said and done around me. It finds all this tedious and vain, like a struggle of phantoms flailing away in a void; it seems to know another world, to foresee a different life, not yet to be found on earth but which will come and cannot fail to come, for only then will true reality be achieved. To me this voice is the voice of my real self. I live like a foreigner acclimatized in an alien land; the natives like me and I like them. I diligently work for their good, share their sorrows and rejoice in their joys, but at the same time I know that I am a stranger, I secretly long for the fields of my homeland, for its different spring, the smell of its flowers, and the way its women speak. Where is my homeland? I shall never see it, I shall die in foreign parts.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories

“Sometimes I feel entirely disassociated form what I do. It's a malady of the modern age.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories

“His life, like every other life, could be graphed: an ascent that rises to a peak, pauses at a particular node, and then descends. Only the gradient changes in any particular case: this child's was steeper than most, his descent swifter. We all ripen. We are all bound by the same ineluctable law, the same mathematical certainty.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories

“He had the neurotic's partial vision of life, and a sense of the absurdity which adheres to all effort when observed in the light of a long enough perspective. This had never made him popular.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories

“Most of those characters with all the answers couldn't poor piss out of a rubber boot if they read the instructions printed on the sole.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories

“Of course, I could holler Religious Persecution. Not that it would do any good. But it's something I happen to know quite a bit about, seeing as Religious Persecution was my assignment in Social Studies that time we studied Man's Inhumanity to Man. The idea was to write a two-thousand-word report proving how everybody has been a shit to everybody else through the ages, and where did it ever get them? This is supposed to improve us somehow, I guess.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories

“They teach us that in school, matters of principle. I swear it's a plot to get us all slaughtered the day they graduate us out the door. It's their revenge, see? Here we are reading books in literature class about some banana who's only got one oar in the water to start with, and then he pops it out worrying about principles.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories

“But there was also the shame of a man who suddenly discovers that all his lies were transparent, and everything he thought so safely hidden had always been in plain view. He had been living one of those dreams. The kind of dream in which you are walking down the street, meeting friends and neighbours, smiling and nodding, and when you arrive at home an pass a mirror you see for the first time that you are stark naked.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories

“...my longing was for Russia...Not Soviet Russia. But nineteenth-century Russia, the Russia of Dostoevsky's saintly prostitutes and Alyosha; of Tolstoy's Pierre; and Aksionov, the sufferer in "God Sees the Truth But Waits." A country where the characters in books were allowed to ask one another the questions: How must I live to be happy? What is goodness? Why does man suffer? What is to be done?”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Selected Stories