Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 113

Many veterans feel guilty because they lived while others died. Some feel ashamed because they didn’t bring all their men home and wonder what they could have done differently to save them. When they get home they wonder if there’s something wrong with them because they find war repugnant but also thrilling. They hate it and miss it.Many of their self-judgments go to extremes. A comrade died because he stepped on an improvised explosive device and his commander feels unrelenting guilt because he didn’t go down a different street. Insurgents used women and children as shields, and soldiers and Marines feel a totalistic black stain on themselves because of an innocent child’s face, killed in the firefight. The self-condemnation can be crippling.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015
David Brooks
Pursuit of contentment is not the pursuit of an elusive tomorrow; it is the celebration of today. In that, it is the pursuit to end all pursuits.
Majid Kazmi
Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.
Steven Pinker
Some churches, sects, cults, or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretation of reality.
Eckhart Tolle
I puked rainbows all over my childhood, and it felt so good.
L.K. Elliott
The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers.
Naomi Klein
Resilience, thy name is Devine.
Lori Lansens
Once you understand love, you don’t need a reward your kindness or compassion just like you don’t need a reward for breathing.
Vironika Tugaleva
I understood something about myself as well, even if I didn't have the will to examine it just then.
Rachel Hartman
Successes are like milestones while excellence is a never-ending journey.
Majid Kazmi
To live with fear and not be afraid is the final test of maturity.
Edward Weeks
Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?Probably not. Why would you? Well, l
Anne Carson
Your pain is trying to tell you something. It is not an accident, a curse, or an inconvenience. Pain is a form of self-communication.
Vironika Tugaleva
Not success. Not growth. Not happiness. The cradle of your love of life … is death.
Stephen Jenkinson
Bullying is an attack upon the runts of the litter - the weak of the species, and it is predicated on a lack of bond with the parents. If a child has a secure bond with the parents, that forms a force-field around the child in terms of bullying. If the child does not have a strong bond with the parents, then it's like being separated from the herd - those are the ones who get picked off by the human predators in childhood and adulthood. So keep your contacts as close as you can, they provide an amazing shield against bullies and users.
Stefan Molyneux
when you are brokenand he has left youdo not questionwhether you wereenoughthe problem wasyou were so enoughhe was not able to carry it
Rupi Kaur
When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.
Margaret Atwood
America's over. Get out while you still can.
J.M. Porup
Now listen to the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s. These were developed by the people who went on to become part of the Fascist experience:(1) shift power directly to economic and social interest groups;(2) push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies;(3) obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest -- that is, challenge the idea of the public interest.This sounds like the official program of most contemporary Western governments.
John Ralston Saul
Every time you look up at the stars, it’s like opening a door. You could be anyone, anywhere. You could be yourself at any moment in your life. You open that door and you realize you’re the same person under the same stars. Camping out in the backyard with your best friend, eleven years old. Sixteen, driving alone, stopping at the edge of the city, looking up at the same stars. Walking a wooded path, kissing in the moonlight, look up and you’re eleven again. Chasing cats in a tiny town, you’re eleven again, you’re sixteen again. You’re in a rowboat. You’re staring out the back of a car. Out here where the world begins and ends, it’s like nothing ever stops happening.
Bryan Lee O'Malley
Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.
Cory Doctorow
Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.
Margaret Atwood
I was crying for the little girl I had been, who had withstood terrifying nightmares of death and blood and war and maiming. And when I had tried to share those horrors, the shock on my friends' faces had told me I was not normal, and I should keep my dreams to myself.
Cheryl R Cowtan
In the womb of the Virgin Mary, God “becomes” human, receiving from her the body that makes possible the “passion” of God; while on the Cross, through the Jewish flesh given of Mary, the divine Son is truly crucified. In the same way, in the Eucharist, Christians receive the very flesh the Logos received of Mary and united to himself, that “truly life-giving flesh of God the Word himself.” Only insofar as God receives the passability of human flesh does he become crucifiable and sacramentally givable.
Aaron Riches
But we don't have to react. That's what I'm saying. A police force, like a government, should be above that. Just because we're provoked doesn't mean we have to act. -- Still Life
Louise Penny
The last time I checked,I didn't have any special talent,thought Kara.Can I paint a demon to death?Drown it in some gouache?
Kim Richardson
One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?
Margaret Atwood
Listening to people espouse beliefs different from mine is informative, not threatening, because the only thing that can alter my worldview is a new and undeniable truth, and contrary to what Jack Nicholson says in 'A Few Good Men', "I CAN handle the truth.
Michael J. Fox
The past is uselessto me now:an old suitcasewith mould in the lining,heavy even when empty.
Robyn Sarah
Enlightenment doesn't disconnect you from the world, rather it gives you a deep understanding of it.
Jiulio Consiglio
Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.
Margaret Atwood
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
Yann Martel
When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into your life anymore.
Eckhart Tolle
But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. all men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character.… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?
Robertson Davies
If you dream and you allow yourself to dream you can do anything.
Clara Hughes
Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't do that again.
Margaret Atwood
You, of all people, deserve a happy ending. Despite everything that happened to you, you aren't bitter. You aren't cold. You've just retreated a little and been shy, and that's okay. If I were a fairy godmother, I would give you your heart's desire in an istant. And I would wipe away your tears and tell you not to cry.-Rachel to Julia
Sylvain Reynard
Let go of all the drama, all that is superficial, all the worry over things you have no control over. Let go of the past. Don't lose yourself in competing and comparing yourself with others. Don't lose yourself in consumerism, in greed, in the acquisition of wealth. What matters the most is that you live. That you live as you, that you live IN your life as your genuine self. Don't put off living. Don't wait until the end of the day to enjoy a couple of hours of life. Don't wait until retirement. Be in whatever it is you do. If you can't, then make every effort to change what it is you do. Whatever you do, do it with care, concern and love. Don't over-complicate your life. Keep it as simple as you can. Do what you love as much as possible. Love what you do as much as possible. Love yourself. Appreciate yourself. Appreciate every drop of life you receive and make the most of it by not shying away from life. Life is meant to be lived. Don't forget to live.
Akiroq Brost
3 P’s are my soulmates: Pain, Prose and Poetry.
Vinita Kinra
There is nothing sexier than sword fight.
Stana Katic
I had found by experience that putting things down on paper helped to clear the mind in precisely the same way, as Mrs. Mullet had taught me, that an eggshell clarifies the consommé or the coffee, which, of course, is a simple matter of chemistry. The albumin contained in the eggshell has the property of collecting and binding the rubbish that floats in the dark liquid, which can then be removed and discarded in a single reeking clot: a perfect description of the writing process.
Alan Bradley
Subtle cues in your behavior will set the frame that you are a selective, high-value guy. She will pick up on this and gain interest. She expects that a guy with potential will be selective. Here are some standards worth considering: An attractive woman who takes care of herself A woman who is sociable and has friends A woman who has a real thirst for life A woman who has a great energy and a positive outlook A woman who is not a flake
Erik Von Markovik
Is the person I was before dead? Or will the worst things that happened to me eventually get diluted by the rest of my life, become just a part of the story that I've always been writing?
Rebecca Rosenblum
Hell, any game that gives its players guns is probably not the kind that'll ever really let you go free.
Jeanne Ryan
You will do great and terrible things, Bethany Rudan. Just make sure you know the difference before you choose to act. And look to the boy, the tracker. He anchors you.
Meghan Ciana Doidge
Greta abides by the reasonable philosophy that there is nothing in the universe more boring than someone else's dreams.
Elan Mastai
I'm at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.
Alan Bradley
Eucharisteo—thanksgiving—always precedes the miracle.
Ann Voskamp
He towered over her, dwarfing her with his height and the bulk of his body which was clothed in the way of a mortal gentleman. He felt and heard that voice tremble inside her, replaced the rational voice she allowed to go unchecked. 'He could break me, hurt me, dominate me'."Not break. Not hurt." he murmured as he raised a hand to her cheek and smoothed his fingers down its softness, "But dominate you? Yes. Master you? yes. Make you yield to what you want, make you surrender to who you truly are? Yes.
Charlotte Featherstone
J.I. Packer writes, “It [knowing God] is the most practical project anyone can engage in. Knowing about God is crucially important for living our lives.” Packer continues, “Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through this life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you.
J.I. Packer
Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.
Saul Bellow
Friends disappear or they are powerless. This is what misfortune meansan acid test of friendship.I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Anne Carson
Moments come & go, but special moments last a lifetime.Make them count!
Mark Hewer
We have become obsessed with what is good about small classrooms and oblivious about what also can be good about large classes. It’s a strange thing isn't it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning.
Malcolm Gladwell
You’re practically begging for it, aren’t you?” he murmured.“No.”His chuckle rasped over her senses. “I like begging, Reagan.”“I’m not going to beg.”He was silent for a moment, his fingers still playing, and she wondered if she’d said the wrong thing. Then he said softly, “Damn.
Kelly Jamieson
In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
Alberto Manguel
We habitually compare ourselves to others to a debilitating degree, believing our successes can only be captured by how much we've outpaced someone else. We deal in acceptable ideas. We disregard our own capabilities. We waste a lot of time and emotion on what everyone else is doing well or badly, when we should be investing in and celebrating ourselves. And sometimes we simply forget that we like our own company, or that we love things for our own, deeply personal, individualistic reasons.In short, we forget ourselves, and how to be alone.
Stacey May Fowles
If we had less people who don't know what they are talking about acting like they know what they are talking about, then that's one step closer to making the world a better place.
Ryan Letourneau
If you really want to change society, encourage self appreciation.
Réné Gaudette
He narrowed his eyes at me, pushed out of the booth and stomped over to the cash desk where Ash had returned and was playing a game on his mobile
K.C. Dyer