“It’s funny, he thought. I’m always sure things are going to turn out badly, and, damn it, they usually do.”

Tom Rath's internal monologue in Sloan Wilson The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit

“That’s getting the worst of both ends of the stick.”

Announcer on Monday Night Football Oct. 12, 1992 (re a guy getting called for a personal foul his teammate actually committed)

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Trudeau’s downmarket trip to an upmarket doughnut shop in Winnipeg was PR gone badly wrong.

"Extreme pessimism is a luxury that only the very young can afford. As you become older, pessimism becomes much more spiritually expensive, and you don’t indulge in it unless you are really convinced of what you’re saying. When you’re a 25-year-old, it looks good to say that life is just a can of worms. When you’re 55, it’s not as funny. You’ve seen a few worms by that time."

Robertson Davies, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail Oct. 12, 2005

“The fact that… we still live well cannot ease the pain of feeling that we no longer live nobly.”

John Updike, quoted by ordained minister Kevin Little in an Op Ed in the Ottawa Citizen June 13, 2002

“You’ve got to be strong, and that’s not one of his strengths.”

An announcer on an NHL game in the late 1980s regarding (I believe) Tim Tookey attempting to cover Edmonton Oiler Steve Smith.

“one of the most remarkable things about the great philosophical books is that they ask the same sort of profound questions that children ask. The ability to retain the child’s view of the world, with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare – and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking. We are not required to think as children in order to understand existence. Children certainly do not, and cannot, understand it – if, indeed, anyone can. But we must be able to see as children see, to wonder as they wonder, to ask as they ask.”

Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren How to Read a Book