Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 134

I’m pretty sure all the individuals trying to control other people’s happiness have none in their own lives.
Sarah Liss
The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today.
Margaret Atwood
So, is it too young for you?"He leaned over, lips coming to mine, arms pulling me into a kiss, soft at first, tentative, then ... wow. The guy could kiss. I finally had to pull back to catch my breath."Good answer?" he said."Yep. You like them y
Kelley Armstrong
The present moment is the definition of eternity. It has never not been the present moment. This isn't scriptural or unscriptural - it is merely a logical fact.
John Kuypers
Give a man a mask, and he'll tell you deeper and darker truths. But he'll also be more abusive, unaccountable, and demonic.
Cory Duchesne
What I know about love, I can write on the head of a matchstick.
Barbara Avon
After all," Anne had said to Marilla once, "I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.
L.M. Montgomery
Being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be.
Margaret Atwood
I don't want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds' worth of half babies
Margaret Atwood
Without you, I’m not me. Something inside that I didn’t even know about is broken without you.
Roxanne Snopek
If sharks could smile, they'd smile like he was now.
Kathleen Peacock
A name could be either a ghost or a portent depending on which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in the liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.
Ruth Ozeki
As a vampire, you must accept that every person you ever know will die, and you are the only constant in your life, the only person you can—and should—rely on.
Kelley Armstrong
My mother had raised me on a thousand stories of girls who were saved by the Djinn, princesses rescued from towers, peasant girls rescued from poverty.Turned out, stories were just stories.I was on my own.
Alwyn Hamilton
...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
Michael Ondaatje
It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
Anne Michaels
The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.
Eric Berne
You believe what you do.
Elan Mastai
It's not that life is good or bad. Life just is. It's how you handle the shitty situations that will determine whether it's good or bad.
Iva Ursano
If women lose the right to say where and how they birth their children, then they will have lost something that's as dear to life as breathing.
Ami McKay
Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or craving, before it is explicit or before it sees its object, manifests itself as boredom or some other kind of suffering. And what did I think of myself in relation to the great occasions, the more sizable being of these books? Why, I saw them, first of all. So suppose I wasn't created to read a great declaration, or to boss a palatinate, or send off a message to Avignon, and so on, I could see, so there nevertheless was a share for me in all that had happened. How much of a share? Why, I knew there were things that would never, because they could never, come of my reading. But this knowledge was not so different from the remote but ever-present death that sits in the corner of the loving bedroom; though it doesn't budge from the corner, you wouldn't stop your loving. Then neither would I stop my reading. I sat and read. I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else--that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness or the life of organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding. Well, now, who can really expect the daily facts to go, toil or prisons to go, oatmeal and laundry tickets and the rest, and insist that all moments be raised to the greatest importance, demand that everyone breathe the pointy, star-furnished air at its highest difficulty, abolish all brick, vaultlike rooms, all dreariness, and live like prophets or gods? Why, everybody knows this triumphant life can only be periodic. So there's a schism about it, some saying only this triumphant life is real and others that only the daily facts are. For me there was no debate, and I made speed into the former.
Saul Bellow
Bill C-9 was supposed to be a budget bill, but it came with innumerable measures that had little or nothing to do with the nation's finances. It was, as critics put it, the advance of the Harper agenda by stealth, yet another abuse of the democratic process. The bill was a behemoth. It was 904 pages, with 23 separate sections and 2,208 individual clauses....As a Reform MP, [Stephen Harper] .... said of one piece of legislation that 'the subject matter of the bill is so diverse that a single vote on the content would put members in conflict with their own principles.' The bill he referred to was 21 page long -- or 883 pages shorter than the one he was now putting before Parliament.
Lawrence Martin
That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies.
Margaret Atwood
With acting, you gotta wait until someone gives you a role in a play or movie. With writing, you're not dependent on others, you don't have to wait. You can sit down and just create.
Donal Logue
You honkies want women to be like cookies, all sweet and dainty and easy to eat. But I'm fry bread, you bitch, and I'm proud of it.
Eden Robinson
I’m not concerned about your comfort zone or readiness for change. I’m concerned about the kids who just entered Kindergarten.
Ian Jukes
A happy person is not without sorrow or grief. Happiness is the acceptance of pain, not the lack of it.
Vironika Tugaleva
Much as I admired the elegance of physical theories, which at that time geology wholly lacked, I preferred a life in the woods to one in the laboratory.
J. Tuzo Wilson
Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer?
Yann Martel
Fire. I see it everywhere.
Jen Wylie
Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him.
Steven Erikson
I am a bed of sparks you breathe upon and kindle
John Geddes
Community is a sign that love is possible in a materialistic world where people so often either ignore or fight each other. It is a sign that we don't need a lot of money to be happy--in fact, the opposite.
Jean Vanier
Anyone who has gumption knows what it is and anyone who hasn't can never know what it is.
L.M. Montgomery
The greatest form of betrayal is self-betrayal."-Dr Renu S Persaud
Renu Persaud PhD
The thing is, that when you're young, you always think you'll meet all sorts of wonderful people, that drifting apart and losing friends is natural. You don't worry, at first, about the friends you leave behind. But as you get older, it gets harder to build friendships. Too many defenses, too little opportunity. You get busy. And by the time you realize that you've lost the dearest best friend you've ever had, years have gone by and you're mature enough to be embarrassed by your attitude and, frankly, by your arrogance.
Kate Jacobs
Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous
Eckhart Tolle
Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our timeIs becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzleOf light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changesWrought therein, just as our waywardness meansNothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,And so many people we loved have gone,And no voice comes from outer space, from the foldsOf dust and carpets of wind to tell us that thisIs the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knewHow long the ruins would last we would never complain.
Mark Strand
One of the great self-deceptions--and one of the great foolishnesses--is to tell yourself, Only I will know. Only you will know that you are a liar; only you will know you deal unethically with people who trust you; only you will know you have no intention of honoring your promise. Whose knowledge or judgment do you imagine is more important? It is precisely your own ego from which there is no escape.
Nathaniel Branden
Try. The tiniest dream that you try to make happen, is worth more than the biggest dream you never attempt.
Shane L. Koyczan
I like being present in spaces where I am not welcome because you do not deserve to feel comfortable just because you're racist or sexist or small-minded.
Scaachi Koul
Accepting necessary conflicts for the sake of improving the lives of children is the only fundamental moral crusade that matters.
Stefan Molyneux
Breathtaking.That was the word, Liv decided, which had convinced her to wear the ludicrous outfit, because no one - not the one, solitary boyfriend she'd had during high school, or the leering frat boys she avoided at college parties - had ever spoken to her with such reverence. And with Xander beaming down at her, she did feel beautiful.
Danika Stone
There's nothing special about this place, he thinks. We all forget. Then we forget what we forgot. And that's how we survive.
Adam Sternbergh
You see, the penis, it's so graceless, wouldn't you agree? When it's cold and shrivelled up, it looks like W.H. Auden in his old age; when it's hot, it flops and dangles about in a ridiculous way; when it's excited, it looks so pained and earnest you'd think it was going to burst into tears. And the scrotum! To think that something so vital to the survival of the species, fully responsible for 50 per cent of the ingredients--though none of the work--should hang freely from the body in a tiny, defenceless bag of skin. One whack, one bite, one paw-scratch--and it's just the right level, too, for your average animal, a dog, a lion, a sabre-tooth tiger--and that's it, end of story. Don't you think it should get better protection? Behind some bone, for example, like us? What could be better than our nicely tapered entrance? It's discreet and stylish, everything is cleverly and compactly encased in the body, with nothing hanging out within easy reach of a closing subway door, there's a neat triangle of hair above it, like a road sign, should you lose your way--it's perfect. The penis is just such a lousy design. It's pre-Scandinavian. Pre-Bauhaus, even.
Yann Martel
Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved.
William Paul Young
Some days in the camp you prayed to live; some days you prayed to die quick. Some days you didn't bother praying, knowing there was no sense to anything.
Allan Dare Pearce
Besides, taking a chance on romance is a dance in tight pants. It's risky but frisky. But make the right move and your in the groove.
Lisi Harrison
Kids are important. The most important thing.
Allan Dare Pearce
It’s not the drug that causes the junkie it’s the laws that causes the junkie because of course the drug laws means that he can’t go and get help because he is afraid of being arrested. He also can’t have a normal life because the war on drugs has made drugs so expensive and has made drug contracts unenforceable which means they can only be enforced through criminal violence. It becomes so profitable to sell drugs to addicts that the drug dealers have every incentive to get people addicted by offering free samples and to concentrate their drug to the highest possible dose to provoke the greatest amount of addiction as possible.Overall it is a completely staggering and completely satanic human calamity. It is the new gulag and in some ways much more brutal than the soviet gulag. In the soviet gulags there was not a huge prison rape problem and in this situation your life could be destroyed through no fault of your own through sometimes, no involvement of your own and the people who end up in the drug culture are walled off and separated as a whole and thrown into this demonic, incredibly dangerous, underworld were the quality of the drugs can’t be verified. Were contracts can’t be enforced except through breaking peoples kneecaps and the price of drugs would often led them to a life of crime.People say “well, I became a drug addict and I lost my house, family, and my job and all that.” It’s not because you became a drug addict but, because there is a war on drugs which meant that you had to pay so much for the drugs that you lost your house because you couldn't go and find help or substitutes and ended up losing your job. It’s all nonsense. The government can’t keep drugs out of prisons for heaven’s sakes. The war on drugs is not designed to be won. Its designed to continue so that the government can get the profits of drug running both directly through the CIA and other drug runners that are affiliated or through bribes and having the power of terrorizing the population. To frame someone for murder is pretty hard but to palm a packet of cocaine and say that you found it in their car is pretty damn easy and the government loves having that power." -Stefan Molyneux
Stefan Molyneux
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow
Armed with the new right to sell their products back to host societies, they can bleed both producing and buying populations at the same time. That is why under new international "free trade" agreements private corporations and businesses have increasingly demanded that governments deregulate and lower taxes so that they are not obliged to pay the cost of sustaining the life of host-societies or their environments.
John McMurtry
We love our lovin'....but not like we love our freedom.
Joni Mitchell
you are as faras the moonand as closeas it feelswhen I look upon it.
Christina Strigas
(..)Fate has al­ways been a po­tent force in Rus­sia, where, for gen­er­ations, cit­izens have had lit­tle con­trol over their own des­tinies. Fate can be a bitch, but, as Za­it­sev, Dvornik, and Onofre­cuk had dis­cov­ered, it can al­so be a tiger.
John Vaillant
the struggle is not with others, but within us, to do what we are called to do
John Geddes
Where do you go with your broken heart in tow? What do you do with the left over you? And how do you know, when to let go? Where does the good go, where does the good go?
Tegan Quin
We imagine all these postapocalyptic, class-stratified, new-world-order techno-futures. But actually the real world, the world we live in, this is the dystopia.
Elan Mastai
Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around.
Ruth Ozeki
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path thats clear. I will choose Freewill.
Neil Peart