“it is essential that in entering a new Province you should have the good will of its inhabitants.”

“For however strong you may be in respect of your army, it is essential that in entering a new Province you should have the good will of its inhabitants.”

“This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old house [with dry rot in its structure and perhaps also in its inhabitants];...it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere that that.”

“The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.”

“If the counsel of the peaceniks had been followed, Kuwait would today be the nineteenth province of Iraq. Bosnia would be a trampled and cleansed province of Greater Serbia, Kosovo would have been emptied of most of its inhabitants, and the Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan. Yet nothing seems to disturb the contented air of moral superiority of those that intone the "peace movement".”

“... For me it is essential, essential for the poet to have a new toast, new songs.”