Christmas Every Day

I really believe there are many excellent writers who have never written because they never could begin. This is especially the case of people of great sensitiveness, or of people of advanced education. Professors suffer most of all from this inhibition. Many of them carry their unwritten books to the grave. They overestimate the magnitude of the task, they overestimate the greatness of the final result. A child in a prep school will write the History of Greece and fetch it home finished after school. “He wrote a fine History of Greece the other day,” says his fond father. Thirty years later the child, grown to be a professor, dreams of writing the History of Greece — the whole of it from the first Ionic invasion of the Aegean to the downfall of Alexandria. But he dreams. He never starts. He can’t. It’s too big. Anybody who has lived around a college knows the pathos of those unwritten books.

All Dickens’s humour couldn’t save Dickens, save him from his overcrowded life, its sordid and neurotic central tragedy and its premature collapse. But Dickens’s humour, and all such humour, has saved or at least greatly served the world.

The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience in the New World. In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life, and an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.

I think I’ll spend the month of November celebrating the wit of Canada’s own Stephen Leacock. Here we go:

I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.

The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.

The world breaks everyone … those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of–but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Conservatives do not believe that political struggle is the most important thing in life…The simplest among them prefer fox-hunting—the wisest religion.