Some things you can feel it coming. You don’t fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.

He who falls in love in bars doesn’t need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.

The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell — in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.

Scars can come in handy. I have one myself above my left knee that is a perfect map of the London Underground.

I understand feeling as small and as insignificant as humanly possible. And how it can actually ache in places you didn’t know you had inside you. And it doesn’t matter how many new haircuts you get, or gyms you join, or how many glasses of chardonnay you drink with your girlfriends… you still go to bed every night going over every detail and wonder what you did wrong or how you could have misunderstood. And how in the hell for that brief moment you could think that you were that happy. And sometimes you can even convince yourself that he’ll see the light and show up at your door. And after all that, however long all that may be, you’ll go somewhere new. And you’ll meet people who make you feel worthwhile again. And little pieces of your soul will finally come back. And all that fuzzy stuff, those years of your life that you wasted, that will eventually begin to fade.

You’re supposed to be the leading lady of your own life.

Miles: Why am I attracted to a person I know isn’t good?
Iris: I happen to know the answer to this. Because you’re hoping you’re wrong. And every time she does something that tells you she’s no good, you ignore it. And every time she comes through and surprises you, she wins you over, and you lose that argument with yourself, that she’s not for you.

Canadians may seem undemonstrative and reserved, but not at a hockey game. We may seem isolated and distinct one from another, we may seem non-patriotic, but not at a hockey game. Hockey helps us express what we feel about Canada, and ourselves. It is a giant point of contact, in a place, in a time, where we need every one we have – East and West, French and English, young and old, past and present. The winter, the land, the sound of children’s voices, a frozen river, a game – all are part of our collective imaginations. Hockey makes Canada feel more Canadian.

How interesting is a movie or a play that has 100 or 500 main characters? Hockey may have some inherent visual and aural appeal but it is hockey’s people that keep you in your seats and your thumb off the channel flipper. It is their personal dramas — the distinguished veteran who struggles with time, the kid who comes from nowhere, the star who has his world turned upside down — played out before you that keep you tuning in week after week. Drama works best with few characters you can get to know. This is why stars are so important. It is what makes rivalries so necessary.

In the spring of 1981, I joined a Toronto Old-Timers’ team that was going to Finland. We called ourselves the ”Toronto Maple Leaves” – a subtle joke in English, an impossible one in Finnish.

We only speak two languages here: English and profanity.

We know that hockey is where we live, where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games.

Potential is synonymous with getting your ass kicked.

The top three worst things I’ve seen in hockey? The invention of the trap. The invention of the morning skate. And the invention of the extremely ugly uniform.

If you say you’re going to do something, do it.

Damn the consequences — you may only get one chance to have the greatest ride of your life.

Do great things — even if no one is watching.

Everything is impossible until someone does it.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Stars, hide your fires!
Let not light see my black and deep desires.

Look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under it.

I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
And falls on the other.

When our actions do not,
Our fears do make us traitors.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches.
Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt.
He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds.
I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.

Under the seams runs the pain.

Desire is no light thing.

When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person.

Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

His cold politeness, his ceremonious grace, were worse than anything.

All the privilege I claim for my own sex is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.

When she was in her teens, God hadn’t given her the appearance to attract boys, she determined to make up for it by developing a razor-sharp mind that would inflict pain on all those males who were already attached or those who showed all too plainly they couldn’t care less about her. Which amounted to pretty much the whole male population. I’ll hurt you before you hurt me, had been her modus operandi. But there had been a few times when she had thrown all her defences down the toilet — and felt herself as vulnerable as any schoolgirl.
Today it had happened again.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Soul of a woman was created below.

Sweet Lord of the Rings!

Most hunters come through that door think they can get in my pants with some pizza, a six pack, and side one of Zeppelin IV.

Don’t try to con a con man.

Do I look like a ditchable prom date to you?

Sam: I just can’t shake this feeling like I… like I don’t belong here. You know what I mean? Like I should do something more than sit in a cubicle.
Dean: I think most people who work in a cubicle feel that same way.