Peggy Hill Quotes

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.

Love is like this, Faye thinks now. We love people because they love us. It’s narcissistic. It’s best to be perfectly clear about this and not let abstractions like fate and destiny muddle the issue. Peggy, after all, could have picked any boy in the school.

It’s all arbitrary. Had Faye attended a different school. Had her parents moved away. Had Peggy been sick that day. Had she chosen a different boy. And on and on. A thousand permutations, a million possibilities, and almost all of them kept Faye from sitting here in the sand with Henry.

They rumbled north on Glenwood Avenue, passing seedy taverns with soul music cascading through open doors. Peggy said, “Left at the next traffic signal—Falls Avenue.” Following the turn they swung into a tight left-hand curve to plunge down a long, twisting hill. She said, “You’re in Mill Creek Park now. Biggest city-limits park in the United States—Youngstown’s Chamber of Commerce stresses that.

Perhaps the most important distinction between surface vibrations and sounds is that the former are largely ignored, including by scientists who study the senses. For the longest time, researchers saw all kinds of drumming, thumping, shaking, and quivering body parts, and interpreted them as visual or auditory signals, while ignoring the surface waves that those movements produce. Every red-eyed tree frog cues into that sensory world from four and a half days of age, but generations of scientists ignored it. “We have encountered it, but we were not looking for it,” wrote ecologist Peggy Hill. It’s a lesson that sensory biologists, and everyone else, should heed: By giving in to our preconceptions, we miss what might be right in front of us. And sometimes what we miss is breathtaking.