French philosopher Voltaire famously dismissed Canada as but “a few acres of snow.” And what’s wrong with that? Words immortalizing the white, frozen stuff:
1. “Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn’t you? Look harder. It’s where someone got axed in the snow.”
—Margaret Atwood, in Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, 1995
2. “I have it on good authority—from the roads department chief, Mr. Arpin—that it will not snow after the fifteenth of March.”
—Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau
3. “In New York, they understood that my country was not a country, but winter. And that my road was not really a road, but snow.” —Quebec singer and actress Monique Leyrac, reflecting on Gilles Vigneault’s lyrics of the separatist anthem Mon Pays
4. “Snow in April is abominable,” said Anne. “Like a slap in the face when you expect a kiss.” —Writer Lucy Maud Montgomery in Anne of Ingleside (1939)
5. “Now it would be foolish and impossible to try and prevent the manufacture of films containing Canadian snow scenes; but there is no vestige of a doubt that when exhibited overseas they have a detrimental effect of immigration . . . Everything that can be done should be done, to encourage the circulation of screen pictures that demonstrate that snow scenes and dog-trains are but a minor phase in Canadian life.” —Magazine editor Charles F. Paul (1922)
6. “Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.” —Canadian-Argentine writer Alberto Manguel
7. “There was a young man of Quebec
Who was frozen in snow to his neck,
When asked, ‘Are you Friz?’
He replied, ‘Yes I is,
But we don’t call this cold in Quebec.’”
—Attributed to Rudyard Kipling as recalled by Stephen Leacock (1937)
Source: Colombo’s All-Time Greatest Canadian Quotations