No Great Mischief Quotes

“Music is the lubricant of the poor.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod

“The “lamp of the poor” is hardly visible in urban southwestern Ontario, although there are many poor who move disjointedly beneath it. And the stars are seldom clearly seen above the pollution of prosperity.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod

“Sometimes when he would tell me those stories his eyes would fill with tears. People used to say he was sentimental, but it was because he cared. He felt everything deeply. People around here used to call a man like him ‘soft.’ ‘Maybe so,’ he used to say, ‘but I’m always hard when I have to be, you know that.’ He was full of little double meanings like that, my husband.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod

“Do you have children?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Do they make their own beds?”
“Well, sometimes,” I reply.
“You should encourage them to make their own beds,” she says. “It’s good training for life.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod

“When the Canada geese fly north in spring, there is a leader who points the way, a leader at the apex of the V as the formation moves across the land. Those who follow must believe that the leader is doing the best he can but there is no guarantee that all journeys will end in salvation for everyone involved.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod

“There are many things that people will do in the dark that they will not do in light.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod

“As an individual struggling with a language not his own he was difficult to dislike.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod

“Perhaps that’s why he became so interested in history, […] He felt that if you read everything and put the pieces all together the real truth would emerge. It would be, somehow, like carpentry. Everything would fit together just so, and you would see in the end something like ‘a perfect building called the past.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod

“Talking about history is not like living it, I guess. Some people have more choice than others.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod

“Some men,” she would add in ominous seriousness, “are nice as pie in public but within their own homes they are mean and miserly to those who have to live with them all the time. No one, perhaps, knows this except those who are captive within their houses.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod