A life in harmony with others is a wasted one.
A man’s character is usually the opposite of that which masquerades on his face; for this reason, moderation appears to be the greatest of hidden human faults, while at the same time the most difficult to apprehend.
Apparently, never let an opportunity go by to befoul a well-heeled fellow’s banquet table.
The worst thing about growing older is expecting that the world is beholden to you for growing more intractable and even-minded about your faults.
We pine for the deleterious failures of our closest companions so that they will both understand our suffering, and pay homage to our resolve.
To repay a friend’s confidence with secrecy is worse than betraying their trust.
Be wary of anyone bearing gifts, be irreconcilable to anyone bearing advice.
Intemperance is an affliction of the soul that bestows even the most inane and vapid of activities with the sheen of an unobserved novelty.
Avarice seldom exists unaccompanied by a rearing vainglory.
An egotist is not so appalling a creature because he is never responsible for his failures, but because such accidents to his person further his bewitchment.
Love is Pride’s way of acknowledging excellence in connoisseurship.
There may not be much glory in a bottle, but enough to make glory seem like a fool’s errand.
There is no worse abjection or greater triumph than feeling unloved.
Ignorance is like an untapped reserve that can encompass any depth of delusion.
There is no greater impertinence than to be kept waiting.
Romanticism is the solution to all of life’s problems if one is inclined to evade them entirely. In other words, it is just another way to beautify scoundrels.
It is better to be an afterthought to your enemies than to be treated as if you were a curiosity.
Ingratitude is the way to pay a compliment while living among barbarians, gratitude the means to exact revenge while living with the civilized.
Obligations were created for no better purpose than to clarify our disdain for one another.
Good taste accentuates everything currently outside of one’s possession, bad taste everything within grasp.
There are always people who are impeccably indisposed to do anything of value in life except fret about people indisposed to do anything of value in life.
A millennium of philosophical thought has still not found a remedy to the pretense of babbling coherently.
There are as many dullards in the world as there are gaps in one’s thinking.
Never call unannounced unless you are repaying the favor.
One’s mettle usually counts for far less than the ability to dispatch this resolve in an apposite setting.
Even a fruitless task can edify the mysteries of indolence.
The impulse to collect artifacts about us is a desire to erect a monument to our own recklessness; not so that we may silence this lurid activity, but so that we may lay our heads on its altar.
Many a tried path has led to disaster, but only the untrodden road can render one’s misfortune truly exquisite.
Experiencing literature is a very sobering experience: it answers questions life has articulated with the clarity and fitfulness of a stumbling drunk, and reiterates those questions with the clarity and fitfulness of a rambling one.
There are some writers who take to the pen to settle scores, others to elaborate on their own conditions, and still more who seek to communicate their intentions for the sallies of fame.
None, however, are so effective as those who feel this compulsion as supremely as the pangs of masochism.
It is an ill sign for a writer to have no one call on for advice, company or repudiation.
If one regards failure as an antecedent to success, they have never known either.
The wise are never so clever as when they belie iteration for mastery.
There are as many uses for a pen as a gallbladder.
There are times when the literary arts hum the plangent tones of misery like a cracked drum over the distant roll of thunder.
The myth of inspiration’s wayward muse is the closest cure to dilettantism as we are likely to produce, so we would do well to perpetuate it.
Imagination is formlessness in a void of self-absorption.
All meaning is created through crisis and diffusion.
All purity is created through resemblance and disavowal.
There are no new ideas, only unusual ways of forgetting.
Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, and a participant in the collaborative omnibus novel Disintegration in Four Parts. His forthcoming novel Kilworthy Tanner will be released by Vehicule Press in 2024. His writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Walrus, Maclean’s, the Toronto Star, Quill & Quire, Maisonneuve, Catapult, Literary Hub and elsewhere.
“Sentiments and Directions from an Unappreciated Contrarian Writer’s Widow” is excerpted from In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, published by Nightwood Editions (Gibsons, 2020). Permissions granted by the publisher.