Gilbert Parker
Sir Horatio Gilbert George Parker, 1st Baronet PC (1862- 1932), known as Gilbert Parker, Canadian novelist and British politician, was born at Camden East, Addington, Ontario. He was educated at Ottawa and at University of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. Parker started as a teacher at the Ontario School for the deaf and dumb (in Belleville, Ontario). From there he went on to lecture at Trinity College. In 1886 he went to Australia, and became for a while associate editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He also traveled extensively in the Pacific, Europe, Asia, Egypt, the South Sea Islands and subsequently in northern Canada. In the early nineties he began to make a growing reputation in London as a writer of romantic fiction. The best of his novels are those in which he first took for his subject the history and life of the French Canadians; and his permanent literary reputation rests on the fine quality, descriptive and dramatic, of his Canadian stories. His works include: Mrs Falchion (1893), A Lover's Diary (1894), The Battle of the Strong (1898), The Lane That Had No Turning (1900), The Right of Way (1901), Cumner's Son (1904), The Weavers (1907), Northern Lights (1909), and The Judgment House (1913).
“There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.”
“Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars.”
“It's the people who try to be clever who never are; the people who are clever never think of trying to be.”
“War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle.”
“There is no influence like the influence of habit.”
“There's no credit in not doing what you don't want to do. There's no virtue in not falling, when you're not tempted.”
“The real business of life is trying to understand each other.”
“There's no tongue that's so tied, when tying's needed, as the one that babbles most bewhiles. Babbling covers a lot of secrets.”
“She belongs to a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.”
“Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.”
“She was beginning to understand that evil is not absolute, and that good is often an occasion more than a condition.”
“Every man should have laws of his own, I should think; commandments of his own, for every man has a different set of circumstances wherein to work - or worry.”
“He knew the lie of silence to be as evil as the lie of speech.”