Home > Author > Ethan Canin
21 " like a woman in a ball gown sitting at a bus stop. "
― Ethan Canin , A Doubter's Almanac
22 " Optimism is an attempt to circumvent the truth. "
23 " The field itself required a particular mode of thinking. Not merely the standard mathematical skills but a visual dexterity that could retain complex constructions in the mind for long periods of time, transforming certain parameters while leaving others intact. It was a strenuous and disobliging intellectual endeavor, a sea change of thought in which the brain performed multidimensional mapping. "
24 " There were topologists who could build architectural structures in their imaginations, then turn them over, then flip them inside out, then spin them around, then open them up and go inside them. "
25 " The connectors have gained the upper hand. We isolationists languish in the caves. Take "
26 " There’s no answer that ends the search, you know. Obviously, there never will be. The artist seeks to capture the world because the nature of every single object is a mystery to him. The philosopher addresses human nature because he’s a stranger to every part of it. It "
27 " I didn’t answer. Mr. Dowater had a reputation for deadpan humor, a humor that was strangely similar to the low-level, sarcastic sniper fire offered by the school’s underbleacher population of stoners and class-cutters. It didn’t really pay to engage it. After "
28 " Happy isn't even a real idea," he said. "It's just like love. A reasonably skeptical person doesn't even know what it means. "
29 " 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. "
30 " Once he was going, it was difficult to stop him. “Mathematics is like carving a wooden doll,” he said, “and then, one day, you watch as your wooden doll gives birth to another wooden doll.” These words have stayed with me all my life. "
31 " Now she was smiling. “And while you’re at it,” she said, “here’s another one for you. Theodicy. That’s another word Leibniz used. As long as you have the dictionary out, you might as well look ’em both up.” She sipped her tea. “He wrote a whole book about it, as a matter of fact. "
