Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 118

Defined simply, narcissism means excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism means excessive focus on work, achievement, and the practical concerns of life; and restlessness means an excessive greed for experience, an overeating, not in terms of food but in terms of trying to drink in too much of life...And constancy of all three together account for the fact that we are so habitually self-absorbed by heartaches, headaches, and greed for experience that we rarely find the time and space to be in touch with the deeper movements inside of and around us.
Ronald Rolheiser
Be careful who you call crazy. Some of us think it's a compliment.
Marilynn Dawson
This is, perhaps, the greatest challenge of our time – to love in the absence of any immediate rewards for our love.
Vironika Tugaleva
Your two selves: Most people are not aware of the fact that they have two different selves. You have a mind and a spirit (consciousness), and though they seem like one thing, they are separate. The way to realize that this is true is to realize that something has to be listening to the thoughts created by your mind.What is it that hears your thoughts?There is the part of you that thinks and the part that hears the thoughts. The thinking part is your mind; the part that hears the thoughts is your spiritual-self. You do not actually hear thoughts through your ears, because your mind is already inside your head. The point is, your spiritual-self receives the things the mind creates in a similar way to hearing them.Check it out: Just ask yourself, what is it that is hearing the thoughts you are thinking right now?It is your spiritual-self, the same thing that receives all life.
Michael Smith
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it saved my ass.
Michael J. Fox
Well, it’s too late. I’m already attached. And you won’t know if it will last unless you really, really try, right?”“What is that supposed to mean?”“Well, Charlie said I could live with them. And you too. She really likes you. She said she’s never had a mother, and she asked me if I would mind sharing mine. I told her I wouldn’t if she didn’t mind sharing her father.
Lacey Silks
He stares at me, and then leans back in his chair. "He's ill, Jacob."I say nothing. "He's a paragon schnitzophonic.""He's what?!""Paragon schnitzophonic," repeats Uncle Al. "You mean paranoid schizophrenic?""Sure. Whatever. But the bottom line is he's mad as a hatter...
Sara Gruen
I beg your pardon, sir, said the Frenchman. I am not a coloniser.Well, let’s talk Algeria then. Let’s talk about your culture and your celebrated writers.
Rawi Hage
Forgiving is all forgetting is another thing.
Bob Rae
It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.
Claire Messud
Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.
Steven Pinker
When it is winter and we must walk in the blizzard snow do not our fingers and toes whisper death  And when winter is at last over. . .can we not hear our bellies whisper death to us  In the dark don't we know  And when we are paralyzed by nightmares  We know what you are.  With our first cries we rail against you.  We see you in every drop of blood in every tear.
Martine Leavitt
Most people think the biggest sacrifice, the greates act of love you can give is to die for someone. And probably it is. But Sometimes it is the opposite. The biggest thing you can do for someone is to live.
Sarah Wylie
One loses so many laughs by not laughing at oneself.
Sara Jeannette Duncan
There is no end to what we can learn. The book out thereTells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.
Mark Strand
A question which can be answered without prejudice to the government is not a fit question to ask.
John G. Diefenbaker
Connecting with the wilderness allows us to live in the flow of a meaningful, joyful life. Embracing this state of connectedness or oneness with other living beings including animals, as opposed to feeling an “otherness” or “separateness” brings a sense of harmony and enables us to be at peace with oneself and the world.
Sylvia Dolson
I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort… I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things… He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light by a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor he lived in a tent in the summers to save money… All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
Margaret Atwood
Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.
Carol Shields
I made up three lists: Candidate's Accomplishments (real and imaginary), Accusations Against Opponent (including rumours, allegations, innuendos, and lies), and Empty Promises (the more improbable, the better). Then it was merely a matter of taking various combinations of items from the three lists, throwing in some bombast, tossing in a few local references, and, there it was - a brand new speech.
Rohinton Mistry
The person following is never in control, which she knows full well and which is exactly why she does it.
Sara Gruen
All of a sudden, life became too much to bear. Just like that, for no particular reason. Because there was a child’s corpse in the fridge on rue Parthenais. Because I had to start all over again from scratch, one more time. Because I had rolled my rock to the top of the hill and now it was rolling back down again. The times before, I’d always managed to put on a brave face. But there comes a time when you just don’t feel strong enough to look for another place to live and go shopping again for clothes and dishes and cutlery and scouring pads and toilet paper. This was one of those times. When I got back to the hotel, I asked the Barbie at reception for the key to the minibar. It burned in the palm of my hand. I slapped it back down on the counter and ran out. I had to find a meeting.
Bernard Émond
Love is a fever which marriage puts to bed and cures.
Richard J. Needham
Even though we've devoted our lives to music, we both know that the most important things happen without a soundtrack.
Ibi Kaslik
Human beings are not separate from nature. We are nature. The beauty of the sunset is your own beauty. The power of the ocean is your power. We are inseparable from the beauty of the mountains, rivers, and forests that surround us. The more that you can allow your natural self to come out – to honour your natural beauty, your natural creativity, your natural thirst for leadership and compassion – the happier and healthier you’ll be.
Vironika Tugaleva
Marketing should never be just a blunt instrument.
Terry O'Reilly
There are a great many opinions in this world and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.
Mavis Gallant
Who we are is not a question we can ask without seeking to understand the context in which we live. Biblical counselors seek to understand the influences that shape the responses of the human heart.
James MacDonald
Potential has a shelf life.
Margaret Atwood
I could go and buy one of the islands in theBahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build andcreate a new company.
Elon Musk
I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else's, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren't islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody else's?
Charles de Lint
It is well if you go in for revenge to make it as complete as possible.("The Vengeance Of The Dead")
Robert Barr
I will not let the non-knitters of the world decide how normal I am.
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
When night comes, something speaksfrom that soft, fragrant wilderness.It says, the heart is not a door. But it opens.We feel in the dark for the hinge.
Carole Glasser Langille
You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.
Saul Bellow
The dreamtime of creative work is a turnstile to eternity. (from Workbok)
Steven Heighton
i don't blame you for not knowing how to remain soft with me. sometimes i stay up thinking of all the places you are hurting which you'll never care to mention. i come from the same aching blood. from the same bone so desperate for attention i collapse in on myself. i am your daughter. i know the small talk is the only way you know how to tell me you love me. cause it is the only way i know how to tell you.
Rupi Kaur
I'm great at lying to myself.
Karina Halle
Pessimism is a very easy way out when you’re considering what life really is, because pessimism is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today and what has happened just since you were born, you can’t help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems and illnesses of one sort or another. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically from the day when the first amoeba crawled out of the slime and made its adventure on land. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of man or the future of the world.
Robertson Davies
Turn your pain into purpose.
Nelou Keramati
I embrace, I veritably hug and cuddle, the concept of optimism. It is the core of my approach to my existence.
Shane Peacock
What I love is how seamless everything is. You walk throw a forest and come out in a village; and there’s no difference, no division. You aren’t in nature one minute and in civilization the next. The houses are made out of mud and stone and wood, drawn from the land around. Nothing stands out, nothing jars.
Jamie Zeppa
You'll probably die if you stay with me,' he told me.'Then I'm dead either way, because I won't survive without you.
Julie Hockley
In our tribunal, we look only at personal criminal responsibility in a very tightly defined, narrow way and we demand proof beyond a resonable doubt about the involvement of the individual. We do no have a mandate to establish the moral responsibility of those who saw things happen and did nothing, including people who might have had the capacity to stop the process and did nothing. But we have to be careful in thinking that just because we focus on individual criminal guilt we therefore absolve the community. The old distinctions are too simplistic when we move up the chain of command and witness the merging of the collectivity into the personae of these charismatic political and military leaders.'-Louise Arbour, Chief Prosecutor for International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Erna Paris
Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I’m not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that’s been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that’s what growing up is… it’s a fading photograph.
Rebecca McNutt
So we waited. I felt useless. I felt like I was in the way. I wished I had some nervous habits so I could indulge in them.
Moira J. Moore
Nor is it the spirit of those Christians - alas, they are many - whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the sub-middle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves. The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor - spending and being spent - to enrich their fellowmen, giving time, trouble, care and concern to do good to others - and not just their own friends - in whatever way there seems need.
J.I. Packer
Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.
Margaret Atwood
Yes I pay taxes... There are no ethics in the face of coercion, that is blaming the victim. Focus on the man with the gun, not the man in the crosshairs trying to survive.
Stefan Molyneux
I am an educated black woman in a time when educated black people will be called upon to risk everything for the rights of black people everywhere.
Allan Dare Pearce
In less than a year, the Bush administration will strut out of office, leaving the country in roughly the same condition a toddler leaves a diaper.
Graydon Carter
If you love her. If you want her to stay. Fight for her.
Janet Gurtler The Truth About Us
I really hate you."It was loud and clear in his brain. "Your first words. How sweet." "Get out of my head. You’re not invited.""This is how Changelings communicate as wolves. Get used to it." He picked his way through the bushes to get closer to her – although he was prepared to dodge if she decided to bite him again. "Are you okay?""My head hurts. No thanks to you.""Yeah, well my ass hurts. No thanks to you.
Dani Harper
Because I don’t want to give you any reason to be mad at me. I don’t want to give you a reason to hate me because, as much as I might have have begged you to do that, you’re the single most important thing in the world to me, Charlie Chase. You’ve become my world. And how do I live in a world where you don’t exist?
Nicole Williams
Wherever I travel I'm too late. The orgy has moved elsewhere.
Mordecai Richler
We're by-products of the mid-twentieth century", Oliver said. "Who isn't?
Ruth Ozeki
If she remember right, people who had a God didn't seem to hold to drinking' an' beating' their women. With a little luck maybe she wouldn't have to put up with that anyway.
Janette Oke
Metaphysical speculation is independent of the physical validity of the Big Bang itself and is irrelevant to our understanding of it.
Lawrence M. Krauss
Progress is something with no pity, and no purpose. It just happens. It chews up all you ever knew, and spits out things you can't understand, and the only value it seems to have is to make a few people a lot of money.
Spider Robinson
Why is it," she asked, snuggling closer, "that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?
Mary Balogh