George Fetherling Quotations

Poets are accepted in Canada as practically nowhere else in the West because of their place in an officially supported and popularly endorsed Canadian culture. Yet, they are still bitter and argumentative, as poets elsewhere are, because they have no audience as such, only a sanctioned role in the cultural scheme of things.

I suffered from a quite severe speech impediment when I was young, and keeping a journal was part of the therapy.

Romantic ideas about the heart fly in the face of known fact, but that doesn't matter and never has. People many thousands of years ago knew that the heart is basically a blood pump, but that didn't keep them from also believing it was the seat of romantic love (and all other strong emotion).

The heart was always seen as the noblest of the internal organs as well as the most vital. The hearts of martyrs or future candidates for sainthood would be preserved, but never their livers, say, or the entrails - at least not on their own; it was either the heart by itself or the whole lot together.

There are many thousands of books on particular assassinations and on the subject in general, but nearly all of them deal with the victims, not the perpetrators.

Prague is not, strictly speaking, travel writing but it is, among other things, an excellent example of what travel writing is becoming, if indeed it hasn't already done so. . . . People are no longer so easily satisfied by the mere travel impressions of some outsider much like themselves. Instead they gravitate towards writers who actually have lived not simply in, but inside, a location for an extended period, as one lives inside one's clothes.

Sometimes I joke that I'm an Elizabethan who's had the misfortune to be alive during the reign of the wrong Elizabeth.

Your absence has not taught me how to be alone, it merely has shown that when together we cast a single shadow on the wall