Wilderness Tips Quotes

Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.

A tip from Lubitsch: 'Let the audience add up two plus two and they'll love you forever.

She would be invisible, of course. No one would hear her. And nothing has happened, really, that hasn't happened before.

Among wilderness survival tips, punching a wild animal in the face probably isn’t on a checklist.

The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes.

Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.

She had loved him, uselessly.

Time is going faster and faster; the days of the week whisk by like panties.

Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.

Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.

I no longer think that anything can happen. I no longer want to think that way. Happen is what you wait for, not what you do; and anything is a large category.

He can see the point of venison, of killing to eat, but to have a cut-off head on your wall? What does it prove, except that a deer can't pull a trigger?

Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.

She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate.

What she read was a series of short connected lyrics, “Isis in Darkness.” The Egyptian Queen of Heaven and Earth was wandering in the Underworld, gathering up pieces of the murdered and dismembered body of her lover Osiris. At the same time, it was her own body she was putting back together; and it was also the physical universe. She was creating the universe by an act of love.

It's simple,' Kat told them. 'You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety.

Once in a while, though, he went on binges. He would sneak into bookstores or libraries, lurk around the racks where the little magazines were kept; sometimes he'd buy one. Dead poets were his business, living ones his vice. Much of the stuff he read was crap and he knew it; still, it gave him an odd lift. Then there would be the occasional real poem, and he would catch his breath. Nothing else could drop him through space like that, then catch him; nothing else could peel him open.

Whatever are you making, Pa?” Laura asked, and he answered, “Wait and see.” He heated the tip of the poker red-hot in the stove, and carefully he burned black every alternate little square. “Curiosity killed a cat, Pa,” Laura said. “You look pretty healthy,” said Pa.

I will bend, I will touch the ground, or as close to it as I can get without rupture. I will lay a wreath of invisible money on her grave.

the wife was as old as her own mother, almost, and women like that did not really have lives.

Jane resented him for it, but she didn't blame him. Her mother inspired in almost everyone who encountered her a vicious desire for escape.

Sometimes he gets high, on the pot that circulates as freely as cigarettes did once. He thinks he should be enjoying this experience more than he actually does.

Her life began to seem long. Her adrenalin was running out. Soon she would be thirty, and all she could see ahead was more of the same.

Part of the life she should have had is just a gap, it isn't there, it's nothing.

She was something of his own that he had lost.

He'd forgotten what delight felt like.

He will exist for her at least, he will be created by her, he will have a place in her mythology after all.

The girls in the stories make such fools of themselves. They are so weak. They fall helplessly in love with the wrong men, they give in, they are jilted. Then they cry.

What he craved was not her body as such. He wanted to be transformed by her, into someone he was not.

[She] smiles, too, and eats and drinks, and is happy, and outside the kitchen window the wind blows and the world shifts and crumbles and rearranges itself, and time goes on.

He would like to get out of his own body for a while; he'd like to be somebody else.

The question at this age is what kind of dog you will shortly resemble. She will be a beagle, Prue a terrier. Pamela will be an Afghan, or something equally unearthly.

Diversity is resilience.

Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It's just what is done, mundane as hockey. It's celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.

It was what they both wanted: freedom from the world of mothers, the world of precautions, the world of burdens and fate and heavy female constraints upon the flesh. They wanted a life without consequences.

I will never be that old, thinks Joanne. I will die before I'm thirty. She knows this absolutely. It's a tragic but satisfactory thought. If necessary, if some wasting disease refuses to carry her off, she'll do it herself, with pills. She is not at all unhappy but she intends to be, later. It seems required.

By the time she was sixteen, Jane had heard enough about this to last her several lifetimes. In her mother’s account of the way things were, you were young briefly and then you fell. You plummeted downwards like an overripe apple and hit the ground with a squash; you fell, and everything about you fell too. You got fallen arches and a fallen womb, and your hair and teeth fell out. That’s what having a baby did to you. It subjected you to the force of gravity.

He held a knife against her breast, As into his arms she pressed, sang the girl. I could just leave, thought Richard. But he didn't want to do that. Oh Willy Willy, don't you murder me, I'm not prepared for eternity. Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.

It's the forties look," she says to George, hand on her hip, doing a pirouette. "Rosie the Riveter. From the war. Remember her?" George, whose name is not really George, does not remember. He spent the forties rooting through garbage bag heaps and begging, and doing other things unsuitable for a child. He has a dim memory of some film star posed on a calendar tattering on a latrine wall. Maybe this is the one Prue means. He remembers for an instant his intense resentment of the bright, ignorant smile, the well-fed body. A couple of buddies had helped him take her apart with the rusty blade from a kitchen knife they'd found somewhere in the rubble. He does not consider telling any of this to Prue.

This is no country for old men, she recites to herself. One of the poems she memorized, though it wasn’t on the final exam. Change that to old women.

But she knows other things, hidden things. Secrets. And these other things are older, and on some level more important. More fundamental. Closer to the bone.

Out on the lake there were two loons, calling to each other in their insane, mournful voices. At the time it did not sound like grief. It was just background.

It’s an old sound, a sound left over.

There is no sun at all, no moon; only the rustling northern lights, like electronic music, and the hard little stars.

Something has changed, she has changed something, but she doesn’t yet know what.

She skims over the grief.

From such an experience you would emerge reborn, or not at all.

What she wants is what Ronette has: the power to give herself up, without reservation and without commentary. It’s that languor, that leaning back. Voluptuous mindlessness.

He took her body seriously, which impressed her no end.

The ultimate grade six insult, to be accused of loving someone.

She still had the narrative habit, she still wanted to know the ends of stories.

A line has been drawn and on the other side of it is the past, both darker and more brightly intense than the present.

Then she was happy, sure of herself, her plain face almost luminous. She wanted to cause joy. at these times she was loved, at others merely trusted.

They were more effusive in their letters than they ever were in person.

Her own life is placid and satisfactory, but there is nothing much that can be said about happiness.

She has gone over and over it in her mind since, so many times that the first, real shout has been obliterated, like a footprint trampled by other footprints.

Luckily she was not too beautiful; extreme beauty put people off. Instead she looked healthy, vitaminized. Trustworthy.

Maybe I've remembered my whole life wrong,' she told him. 'Maybe I've been wrong about everyone.

He was adored like a pet. Not a dog, but a cat. He went where he liked, and nobody owned him.

An interest in the clothing of the present is frivolity, an interest in the clothing of the past is archaeology.

Jane moved back to Toronto, and found it ten times more interesting than when she'd left it.

There were consequence after all; but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.

But then, I would lose power. Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.

There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.

She was like a child sleepwalking along a roof-ledge ten stories up. He was afraid to call out in warning, in case she should wake, and fall.

Cheap, Donny's mother would say. It's an enticing word. Most of the things in his life are expensive, and not very interesting.

She'd given up the idea of dying young, however. By this time it seemed overly romantic.

And what has become of Ronette, after all, left behind in the past, dappled by its chiaroscuro, stained and haloed by it, stuck with other people's adjectives?

By now she knew better than to betray desire.

There are other jobs. There are other men, or that's the theory.

She must have been at least fifty. The age he now is himself, Richard notes dejectedly. That's one thing Selena has escaped. He thinks of it as an escape.

He didn't want to marry Selena. He couldn't imagine marriage with her. He could not place her within the tedious, comforting scenery of domesticity.

She told him he was a grouch, but since that was more or less the behavior she expected from husbands she didn't seem to mind.

Whether it existed or not, this affair suited Richard, in a way: it allowed him to think badly of her.

Change and decay in all around I see,' she said, smiling in a way he did not like at all. 'I'm not prepared for eternity.

They lived in cheerful squalor. Or not squalor: disorder. I couldn't have stood it myself, but I liked it in her. She made the messes I wouldn't allow myself to make. Chaos by proxy.

She lived with several men, but in each of the apartments there were always cardboard boxes, belonging to her, that she never got around to unpacking; just as well, because it was that much easier to move out. When she got past thirty she decided it might be nice to have a child, some time, later. She tried to figure out a way of doing this without becoming a mother.

Connor was not her first lover but he was her first grown-up one, he was the first who did not treat sex as some kind of panty-raid. He took her body seriously, which impressed her no end.

What did they do for love, on such a ship, at such a time? Furtive solitary gropings, confused and mournful dreams, the sublimation of novels. The usual, among those who have become solitary.

You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety.

But Molly didn't hate men. With men, Molly was a toad-kisser. she thought any toad could be turned into a prince if he was only kissed enough, by her. I was different. I knew a toad was a toad and would remain so. The thing was to find the most congenial among the toads and learn to appreciate their finer points. You had to develop an eye for warts. I called this compromise. Molly called it cynicism

There are other things she revises as well. She revises Connor. She revises herself. Connor's wife stays approximately the same, but she was an invention of Julie's in the first place, since Julie never met her.

It wasn't his actual poems she was regretting, unless she had no taste at all. They hadn't been any good, he knew that now and certainly she did too. It was the poems, the ones he might have written, if. If what?

Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.

What she wants is what Ronette has: the power to give herself up, without reservation and without commentary. It's that languor, that leaning back. Voluptuous mindlessness. Everything Joanne herself does is surrounded by quotation marks.

Nor is it Darce she wants, not really. What she wants is what Ronette has: the power to give herself up, without reservation and without commentary. It’s that languor, that leaning back. Voluptuous mindlessness. Everything Joanne herself does is surrounded by quotation marks.

the idea of exploration appealed to her then: to get onto a boat and just go somewhere, somewhere mapless, off into the unknown. To launch yourself into frights; to find things out. There was something daring and noble about it, despite all of the losses and failures, or perhaps because of them.

She wishes she could go back a few decades, grow up again. The first time, she missed something; she missed a stage, or some vital information other people seemed to have. This time she would make different choices. She would be less obedient; she would not ask for permission. She would not say “I do” but “I am.

It’s love that does it to you,” Jane would reply, in the resigned, ponderous voice of her mother. “You wait and see, my girl. One of these days you’ll come down off your devil-may-care high horse.” As Jane said this, and even though she was making fun, she could picture love, with a capital L, descending out of the sky towards her like a huge foot. Her mother’s life had been a disaster, but in her own view an inevitable disaster, as in songs and movies. It was Love that was responsible, and in the face of Love, what could be done? Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it, it went over you and you came out flat.

Poetry,' she said with scorn. 'I hate poetry. It's just this. This is all there is. This stupid city.' He went cold with dread. What was she saying, what had she done? It was like a blasphemy, it was like an act of desecration. Though how could he expect her to maintain faith in something he himself had so blatantly failed?

She wanted something that was in them, although she could not have said at the time what is was. It was not peace: she does not find them peaceful in the least. Looking at them fills her with wordless unease. Despite the fact that there are no people in them or even animals, it's as if there is something, or someone, looking back out.

You had sex, and love got made out of it whether you liked it or not. You woke up in a bed or more likely on a mattress, with an arm around you, and found yourself wondering what it might be like to keep on doing it. At that point Jane would start looking at her watch. She had no intention of being left in any lurches. She would do the leaving herself. And she did.)

Poetry was the way out then, for young people who wanted some exit from the lumpen bourgeoisie and the shackles of respectable wage-earning. It was what painting had been at the turn of the century. Richard knows this now, although he did not then. He doesn't know what the equivalent is at the moment. Film-making, he'd guess, for those with intellectual pretensions.

Increasingly the sidewalk that runs past her house is clustered with plastic drinking cups, crumpled soft-drink cans, used take-out plates. She picks them up, clears them away, but they appear again overnight, like a trail left by an army on the march or by the fleeing residents of a city under bombardment, discarding the objects that were once thought essential but are now too heavy to carry.

Later, after she had flung herself into the current of opinion that had swollen to a river by the late sixties, she no longer said 'making love'; she said 'having sex.' But it amounted to the same thing. You had sex, and love got made out of it whether you liked it or not. You woke up in a bed or more likely on a mattress, with an arm around you, and found yourself wondering what it might be like to keep doing it.

Molly and I had big ideas, then. We were going to change things. We were going to break the code, circumvent the old boys' network, show that women could do it, whatever it might be. We were going to take on the system, get better divorce settlements, root for equal pay. We wanted justice and fair play. We thought that was what the law was for. We were brave but we had it backwards. We didn't know you had to begin with the judges.

She did not think of him as having an existence apart from her: the wife and kids were just boring subsistence details, like brushing your teeth. Instead she saw him in glorious and noble isolation, a man singled out, like an astronaut, like a driver in a bell-jar, like a saint in a medieval painting, surrounded by a golden atmosphere of his own, a total-body halo. She wanted to be in there with him, participating in radiance, basking in his light.

He peeled the towel that imprisoned us away and let it fall. I felt it slide softly off my backside, and I felt, too, his rising excite¬ment, hard, erect, pressing against me. My nipples were erect, straining, aching, pressed against his strong warm damp chest, the tangle and pattern of his hair. He was a beast, an animal. My excitement was rising again, to match his. It was as if my heart were about to burst or to flip flop, breathless, into a dark abyss. “Of course, you are crazy, my darling, but, then, so am I.” He kissed me and his oh-so-clever hands seized my waist, tighten¬ing, and then sneaking up my backside, pulling me, pressing me closer, into him. He kissed me again, and his lips moved down my neck to my shoulder and then to my breasts. “Oh,” I said, “Oh.” He bent over me, kissing my collarbone and then my breasts, carefully, slowly, his hands traveling down my back, and over my backside; suddenly, he was on his knees, kissing the whorl of 101 my belly button; then he was forcing me open, gently, gently, his tongue exploring caressing, devouring … “Oh …” I exhaled a deep, shuddering breath. I tipped on the very edge. He bit me, gently. Oooooh! He pulled in the reins, the bit and bridle, of the frisky frothing filly that I had become; this sudden halt made me wilder, crazier; then, once again, he brought me, trembling, up to the very, very edge of the cliff – of orgasm, of loss of self. Then he pulled me back. I blinked and trembled. Around the two of us, there was a whole world, a whole universe. It seemed too vivid to be real, like the backdrop in an opera. Venus was brighter and lower now. The sky had turned deep indigo. One by one, stars appeared.

There was a time when my married friends envied me my singleness, or said they did. I was having fun, ran the line, and they were not. Recently, though, they've revised this view. They tell me I ought to travel, since I have the freedom for it. They give me brochures with palm trees on them. What they have in mind is a sunshine cruise, a shipboard romance, an adventure. I can think of nothing worse: stuck on an overheated boat with a lot of wrinkly women, all bent on adventure too. So I stuff the brochures in behind the toaster oven, so convenient for solo dinners, where one of these days they will no doubt burst into flame. I get enough adventure, right around here. It's wearing me out.

Jane doesn't watch very much television. She used to watch it more. She used to watch comedy series, in the evenings, and when she was a student at university she would watch afternoon soaps about hospitals and rich people, as a way of procrastinating. For a while, not so long ago, she would watch the evening news, taking in the disasters with her feet tucked up on the Chesterfield, a throw rug over her legs, drinking a hot milk and rum to relax before bed. It was all a form of escape. But what you can see on the television, at whatever time of day, is edging too close to her own life; though in her life, nothing stays put in those tidy compartments, comedy here, seedy romance and sentimental tears there, accidents and violent deaths in thirty-second clips they call bites, as if they were chocolate bars. In her life, everything is mixed together.