Solomon Gursky Was Here Quotes

“Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried.”
― Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here

“It seems to me that our lives are consumed by countless wasting years, but only a few shining moments. I missed mine. Yes is what I should have said. Of course I should have said yes.”
― Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here

“Obviously the raven with the unquenchable itch was at it again, playing tricks on the world and its creatures. Once by air, he thought, and now by water.”
― Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here

“If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island.”
― Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here

“Without a doubt, it [Canada] is the land God gave to Cain.”
― Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here

“Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish, the famine; and Jews, the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared of the Americans on one side and of the bush on the other. And now that we are here, prospering, we do our damn best to keep out our more ill-bred newcomers because they remind us of our own mean origins in the draper's shop in Inverness, or the shtetl, or the bog.”
― Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here