Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 10

Nature is beautiful in all its chaos. However, a nature photograph is beautiful only in the absence of chaos.
Mike MacDonald
When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?
Douglas Coupland
Gender roles suck," says Swift Fox.Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.
Margaret Atwood
The love of truth lies at the root of much humour.
Robertson Davies
Every poet — every storyteller — requires motivation.
Andrew Pyper
My companions ate the bear. I found I had no appetite.
Rachel Hartman
Power only tires those who don't exercise it.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau
At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.
Rachel Cusk
the knowledge that change can be frightening, that responsibility can, but that the answer to that is not refusing to change or to accept responsibility.
Jo Walton
The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land — all things born of the soul that can only be felt.
Anthony De Sa
Set a goal to achieve something that's so big so exhilarating that excites you & scares you at the same time.
Bob Proctor
Remember that the truth within yourself will always be greater than the truth found in these pages. These stories are here to guide us—to help us find that truth, not to tell us what it is.
Andrew Kaufman
The only time they ever throw anything away is when it's really and truly broken, and then they make a big deal about it. They save up all their bent pins and broken sewing needles and once a year they do a whole memorial service for them, chanting and then sticking them into a block of tofu so they will have a nice soft place to rest. Jiko says that everything has a spirit, even if it is old and useless, and we must console and honor the things that have served us well.
Ruth Ozeki
Putting his head down on the dog's neck, he vowed to himself fervently that he would always have some money on hand, no matter what became of him, so that he would be able to protect all that was truly valuable from the practical people in the world.
Morley Callaghan
Antonio-"Just in time, Pete. Five more minutes of reading this and she'd have been in a coma."Peter-"Are we such bad company that you'd rather hide out in here reading that old thing?
Kelley Armstrong
Given the choice between one lifetime spent with you or a thousand without, I will always choose you.
Danielle L. Jensen
It must be lovely to be grown up, Marilla, when just being treated as if you were is so nice...Well, anyway, when I grow up, I'm always going to talk to little girls as if they were, too, and I'll never laugh when they use big words.
L.M. Montgomery
The British are terribly lazy about fighting. They like to get it over and done with and then set up a game of cricket.
Stephen Leacock
My heart has had love and lost love but it keeps on loving. That's just what hearts do.
Iva Ursano
Maybe I did mean to kill myself. I didn't think it outright but...maybe the truth is, I didn't--I don't--much care one way or th'other.
Moira Young
Nonsense. Everyone knows Canadians are a peaceful people.” He was laughing now.“Tell that to the White House circa 1812,” I told him.“Oh? Why?”“Because that’s the year the peace-loving Canadians burned it to the ground.”Dominick grabbed an empty bottle and jumped onto his chair. The room got silent in an instant as everyone paused to look at him. “Cheers to 1812.” He lifted his empty bottle.The whole room whooped and raised their full glasses, howling in unison.I could barely hear over the sound of my own laughter.
Sierra Dean
The sum of his life was a unique melody, hauntingly beautiful and powerful.
Ann Marston
She has always said that talking makes everyone feel better. He says talking is the equivalent of grooming. The tongue and fingers are governed by the same parts of the brain. He marvels at how close they can be some nights on the phone and how words really are the equal of touch. Bakelite pressed hard against his ear.She says it's not just the freedom from him and from their daughter. I feel some sort of opening. I saw things so clearly today.He thinks about the solitary figure in every religion, the monks, saints and shamans in every tradition who walk out into wilderness on their own and find revelation.It's what solitude does to a social animal he says.People talk of recognizing something greater than themselves when they're alone because we finally have to realize how helpless we are as individuals. There's a freedom, a sense of wonder in feeling for a moment that we don't have to please anyone or adjust to the needs of others. And there's a fear in realizing how small we are, how much those distant others normally insulate us from seeing the limits of our mostly incompetent bodies. When we're on our own we seek solutions and speculate and fictionalize because that's what we do when we're confronted with survival. That's revelation.Maybe she says, I'm just saying I'd like to eat less meat. We could have fish.
Colin McAdam
Home is where the backpack is
Savannah Grace
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist.
Adam Gopnik
There are times when you have to commit a crime to prevent an even bigger one. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I can’t sleep at night.
Judy Penz Sheluk
In my heart, I am American, and I believe I have a free will and can take charge of my own destiny.
Ruth Ozeki
If she’d had any doubts he was a real deal country boy, they disappeared when he unabashedly stripped down to nothing—the sun had kissed his arms to mid-bicep, although his torso wasn’t without a faint tan. She’d thought lazily that maybe he had a pond. She’d like to go skinny dipping with him. Leap onto his back and wrap her legs around his lean hips. Hold on to his broad shoulders and press her naked breasts into his back and drift into the cool water together.As he opened his button-fly jeans, revealing snug briefs underneath, she’d whispered for him to stop. He was hard and sinewy in all the right places, with shadows and valleys she wanted to explore with her mouth and hands and eyes, but her touch first went to the line where dark faded to light on his arm, neatly following the curve of his muscles. “Nice farmer’s tan.
Zoe York
True confidence is born of experiencing your hard work and seeing your determination pay off.
Lorii Myers
Life-changing gratitude does not fasten to a life unless nailed through with one very specific nail at a time.
Ann Voskamp
Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn’t remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt.
Emily St. John Mandel
She rubbed her lips over him, then lifted her head to meet his eyes. "Tell me what you like."t"Everything," he choked out. "I like everything you're doing."t"Tell me," she insisted....tAlthough it nearly killed him to say it, he mumbled, "Start slow. Make me beg for it.
Elle Kennedy
...so you have found me and would know the tale. When a poet speaks of truth to another poet, waht hope has truth? Let me ask this, then. DOes one find memory in invention? Or will you find invention in memory? Wich bows in servitude befor the other? Will the measure of greatness be weighed solely in details? Perhaps so, if details make up the full weft of the world, if themes are nothing more than the coomposite of lists perfectly ordered and unerring rendered; and if I should kneel before invention, as if it were memory made perfect.
Steven Erikson
I suppose the other thing too many forget is that we were all stories once, each and every one of us. And we remain stories. But too often we allow those stories to grow banal, or cruel or unconnected to each other.We allow the stories to continue, but they no longer have a heart. They no longer sustain us.
Charles de Lint
I almost forgot to tell you - you have the right to remain silent, but if you do, my boys at the station will process your bones to help you confess.
Rohinton Mistry
There's something I want to say in this space, but it's an emptiness where there's usually a hug. — Colin Morton to Mary Lee Bragg, 1972
David Eso
London is yours. If you want it.
Jacquelyn Middleton
The categories used in psychiatric diagnosis are based on observation of signs and symptoms, rather than on pathological processes. One can make use of a few signs, such as facial expressions associated with depression or the flight of ideas associated with mania. But what clinicians mainly use for diagnosis are symptoms, the subject experiences reported by patients. Psychiatrists have little knowledge of the processes that lie behind these phenomena. Thus psychiatric diagnoses, with very few exceptions, are syndromes, not diseases.
Joel Paris
From the managerial perspective, Sir Oliver Humperdink, a heinous sort for most of his career, said the release of pentup emotions might even have been healthy for mind and soul. "As heels, we were able to be as annoying and politically incorrect’ as possible.We were able to say and do what everyone probably wanted to say and do, but, for one reason or another, could never, ever get away with. And, by being able to do so, I generally found that my fellow heels were much more 'easygoing' than our babyface counterparts who had to 'toe the line.
Greg Oliver
By serving humanity, I automatically serve myself.
Vironika Tugaleva
I have no doubt at all the Devil grins,As seas of ink I spatter. Ye gods, forgive my "literary" sins --The other kind don't matter.
Robert W. Service
Go to the ant thou sluggard learn to live and by her busy ways reform thy own.
Elizabeth Smart
There's no doubt I'm emotional.
Sidney Crosby hockey player
Things aren't different. Things are things.
William Gibson
What makes one strong is not the ability to confront adversity and cruelty, but rather the ability to love in spite of it.
Christopher Earle
[She] sees. She knows. She understands. About evil, or whatever you care to name it. It comes. It's relentless. It doesn't care if you forgot it. It searches, and it finds you, and it arrives on your doorstep one day, and it lights up a screen, it calls you by your real name, it smiles at you, it says hello, it eyes your son and promises to take him home.
Adam Sternbergh
From all of our beginnings, we keep reliving the Garden story.
Ann Voskamp
Universities, he (William Dershowitz) says, have been absorbed into the commercial ethos. Instead of being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.
David Brooks
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
Eckhart Tolle
There's money, and then there's class. The two are often separated.
Kate Jacobs
I need to tell you a story.'What
Emma Richler
Remember when I moved in you and the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was, "Hallelujah.
Leonard Cohen
Each person in your life is a teacher, each experience in your life is a lesson. Living is like looking into a mirror, every teacher is you.
L.J Vanier
Whatever's between us is that kind of new.
Courtney Summers
You have no idea how dearly I wish you were of my blood. My daughter, granddaughter. Will you allow me to take pride in what you are?"-- Sandre to Catriana
Guy Gavriel Kay
I hope I’m the ghost that belongs to her.
Courtney Summers
Everyone runs around trying to find a place where they still serve breakfast because eating breakfast, even if it's 5 o'clock in the afternoon, is a sign that the day has just begun and good things can still happen. Having lunch is like throwing in the towel.
Jonathan Goldstein
Creativity and expression of one’s art can only be measured by the audience to whom it was intended for.  Not everyone is going to like my “art” and I don’t really care about that.
Anne-Rae Vasquez
Keep a positive mind. Remember, a failed attempt doesn’t make you a failure—giving up does.
Lorii Myers
The world was in truth made of jackstraws. The world was very combustible, the human body was partible in ways heretofore unimagined. What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will. Civilization was not in the natural order but was some wort of willed invention held taut like a fabric or a sail against the chaos of the winds. And why we had invented it, or how we knew to invent it, was beyond him.Newmann had seen some truth that was completely out of his power to put into words. But he had come away knowing that even though the world of civilization was made of straw and lantern slides, he must live in it as if it were solid. Even when the heat of the lantern itself burnt away the illusions and a black hole appeared in the middle of the slide.
Paulette Jiles