Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 135

you know the way of the wind in the night—the desolate alleys my soul takes
John Geddes
[Texting] discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting's hyperimmediacy. E-mails take some time to work their way through the Internet, through switches and routers and servers, and they require that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you've got a recipe for addiction: You receive a text, and that activates your novelty centers. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you fifteen seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out "More! More! Give me more!
Daniel J. Levitin
This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can’t live without love. That life has very little meaning without love. So we’re invited into this arena which is a very dangerous arena, where the possibilities of humiliation and failure are ample. So there’s no fixed lesson that one can learn, because the heart is always opening and closing, it’s always softening and hardening. We’re always experiencing joy or sadness. But there are lots of people who’ve closed down. And there are times in one’s life when one has to close down just to regroup.
Leonard Cohen
She was surprised to discover that Paola was thirty-four. 'What have you been doing all this time?' she wanted to ask, but instead she said, 'What brought you to England?''There was a man,' Paola said. 'When the man left, I decided to stay.''An Italian man?'Barely perceptibly, Paola nodded.'He had a job here. He is an -' She paused. '- aeronautical engineer. After a year he had to go home.'Solly was seething with questions. It was strange: in Paola's presence she felt herself to be a failure, yet a part of her believed that a woman of thirty-four with no husband or children was the greatest failure of all. It was a kind of unstoppable need for resolution that grew from her like ivy over the prospect of freedom and tried to strangle it. She couldn't bear the idea of loose threads, of open spaces, of stories without ends. Did Paola not want to get married? Did she not want children, and a house of her own? She sat there in her white sweater, delicately eating. Solly, a sack stuffed with children, a woman who had spent and spent her life until there was none left, sat opposite her, impatient for more.
Rachel Cusk
There is no transcending our minds, only using them optimally.
Vironika Tugaleva
Whenever you get a clear impulse to do or try something different, especially when the idea seems to "come out of nowhere", it's usually something that will turn out to be immensely important to your life path.
Susan Biali
After they had skated around the pond several times, my father asked my mother to marry him. I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then.
Margaret Atwood
He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.
Rachel Hartman
No one has the right to place one human being in a position of political power over another.
Wendy McElroy
...he found it where he should have looked first, on the Internet, which is a net indeed, one that can be cast further than the eye can see and be retrieved no matter how heavy the hall, its magical mesh never breaking under the strain but always bringing in the most amazing catch.
Yann Martel
Which came first: the change-ready company or the change-ready employee?
Lorii Myers
I would like to think of my 'ignorance' less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance.
Ruth Ozeki
A voice is a human gift it should be cherished and used to utter as fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood
Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet
Henry Mintzberg
I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can't imagine them properly now.
Jo Walton
In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A man goes to a foreign country and kills somebody who's not aggressing against him; in a Hawaiian shirt he's a criminal, in a green costume he's a hero who gets a parade and a pension. So that, as a culture, we remain in a state of moral insanity. To point out these contradictions to people in society is to be labeled insane. This is how insane society remains, that anybody who points out logical opposites in the most essential human topic of ethics, is considered to be insane.
Stefan Molyneux
Holy DAMN was that HOT! —Kimberly Treamer
Scarlett Avery
You really want to go out to dinner?" Gabriel shot Rase a skeptical look out of the corner of his eye. t"As opposed to what?" t"Getting on your knees and begging me to beat you." There was no inflection in Gabriel's voice, no heat, and no emotion at all. He wasn't even looking at Rase. t... "I don't want one more than the other," he answered, fully aware that he was being challenged. "They're not interchangeable. I want them both." tRase took a breath to calm the pounding in his chest and continued, even though Gabriel wouldn't look at him. "I want to go out to dinner with you, anywhere you want, on a date. And then I want to go back to your place or my place and I want you to beat me until I bleed.
Anah Crow
When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human and he responds emotionally but at the same time there's this cold observer who cannot cry.
Brian Moore
If all you are doing is spending time with the struggling members of your church and you are not building proactively into your church's culture, and you are being shortsighted and limiting the effectiveness of your ministry.
James MacDonald
To suggest that the grief of Christ issues from his perfect wisdom andcharity would confirm that true sorrow is human and therefore cannotcorrespond to despair, since the hopelessness of despair would yield nothingabout which to sorrow. If life is meaningless, there is no reason tomourn. Truth is what makes grief authentic and real, and so it followsthat Truth Incarnate, come down from heaven to our vale of tears, wouldgrieve at the highest pitch. The “tragic experience of the most completedesolation”49 depends on “the knowledge and experience of the Father.”50Or as Adrienne von Speyr puts it: “The Father is never more present thanin this absence on the Cross.
Aaron Riches
We sacrifice our potential because we do not know that we are pure potential.
Vironika Tugaleva
Although one may direct the future or past through the onerous linkages of temporal cause and effect, riding the breaking waves of the present and never once overstepping it, the better way is to go there and do it yourself.
Mary-Jean Harris
Battle is gruesome, but it is vigorous, alive. The aftermath is the worst of it: adrenaline fades, quiet sweeps in, and there’s nothing to distract you from the mess of bodies and disturbed earth.
Darrell Drake
I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea.
Neil Peart
Canadians have been accustomed to define themselves by saying what they are not.
William Kilbourn
Those who love, truly love, can be coerced into nothing.
Vironika Tugaleva
Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get
W.P. Kinsella
Lavinia has seen this happen, seen how, one day, a girl will raise her head to listen, as if for the first time, to the crying of a child, to the sound of an oar being hauled in, to a man's voice, to the screech of a saw pulling through wood, to some comment one of the women might make. Within a week, the girl will be able to tell at any minute of the day or night, precisely where every soul in the place is. Then - or so Lavinia imagines, for it has never happened to her - one morning before light, before the girl has awakened, a map, new and totally different, will be imprinted behind her closed eyelids.
Bernice Morgan
Historical definition of a country's borders... "...here's where my murder geography ends and your murder geography begins, at least until I get more murderers to expand my murder-fest.
Stefan Molyneux
You know all is not well when Hell resorts to outsourcing to close deals made with the Devil. Or in this case, a guy named Stan.
Carl Begai
As far as I’d seen, most adults tried to pretend they didn’t have parents. Except my shrink, who’d tried to invite me for Christmas dinner last year. As if I wanted to be trapped next to a huge turkey carcass with twenty people I didn’t know. Twenty strangers who all knew exactly who I was.
Meghan Ciana Doidge
I think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.
Michael J. Fox
Fear is more pain than is the pain it fears
L.M. Montgomery
The real difference is that with fantasy—and by that I mean fantasy which can simultaneously tap into a cosmopolitan commonality at the same time as it springs from an individual and unique perspective. In this sort of fantasy, a mythic resonance lingers on—an harmonious vibration that builds in potency the longer one considers it, rather than fading away when the final page is read and the book is put away. Characters discovered in such writing are pulled from our own inner landscapes... and then set out upon the stories' various stages so that as we learn to understand them a little better, both the monsters and the angels, we come to understand ourselves a little better as well.
Charles de Lint
You sure as hell didn't come this far to only come this far. Keep going.
Iva Ursano
And so it was said "tell me your lies and I will help you keep them"And by wisdom attained it was realized that this was not the way. And so it was said "tell me your lies and I will help you heal them in truth without repercussion or judgement; in understanding, compassion and forgiveness.
L.J Vanier
I've been in auditions without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don't affect your judgement. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart. (p.251)
Malcolm Gladwell
I dozed, jolting occasionally at the driver's loud pronouncement of upcoming stops. At this early hour the bus hummed along quietly with few passengers, so the stops were infrequent. In the hazy surrealism of predawn, there really was not much to see--what I could make out was mainly countryside, though not what I would call quaint, and certainly no Shakespearean cottages or fairy folk peeping from the trees.
Carolyn Weber
The women’s entire education should be planned in relation to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to win their love and respect, to raise them as children, care for them as adults… these are women’s duties in all ages and these are what they should be taught from childhood.
Jacques Rousseau
As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, “Life was better since the government came” because “a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot.
Steven Pinker
We could use all the blessings we could get. The impact of what we were about to do hit me like an anvil on Wile E. Coyote's head. We were heading out to stop Satan's son and save the world from certain destruction. Piece of cake.
Terri Clark
Some people have a perfect genius for doing nothing and doing it assiduously.
Thomas Haliburton
The next time you find yourself getting angry, ask yourself: Is this really something I want to give my time and energy to? Will doing so make any positive impact? If your answer is no, consider redirecting that anger-energy as soon as possible! Find something to do that will feed your soul, fuel your fire, passion and creativity. Find something that will bring something new and positive to this world.
Akiroq Brost
We have laws about human rights in place for a reason and even if those laws are so often not enforced BY the law, these laws teach us our rights as human beings. I was shocked when I first discovered them, but at the same time I found them empowering; especially the ones about emotional abuse and neglect. Always remember that we are healing from the damage and that before the damage can be overcome, it has to be acknowledged.Acceptance in the context of accepting what happened is not the same thing as acceptance of the person who did it. Accepting the way a person “is” does not apply when abuse or mistreatment is involved. There is a big difference in accepting someone’s “faults”, verses accepting abusive treatment.
Darlene Ouimet
The purpose that you wish to find in life, like a cure you seek, is not going to fall from the sky. ...I believe purpose is something for which one is responsible; it's not just divinely assigned.
Michael J. Fox
And they continued steadfastly (Acts 2:42) - That is to say, they did not backslide. The real reason there are so many backsliders is because there are so many who have never had a forward slide to Jesus Christ.
Oswald J. Smith
Of course, being open and vulnerable will lead us to, sometimes, experience pain. But what is pain? It is simply a feeling. It is not forever. If you get pain from some person or thing too many times, you can always walk away. To risk a lifetime without pleasure simply to avoid pain is ludicrous.
Vironika Tugaleva
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.
Yann Martel
I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
Alice Munro
If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives: clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred and unsullied.
Steven Pinker
I have been seeing dragons again.Last night, hunched on a beaver dam,one held a body like a badly held cocktail;his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz,sent a morse of ripples to my canoe.They are not richly brightbut muted like dawnsor the vague sheen on a fly's wing.Their old flesh drags in foldsas they drop into grey pools,strain behind a tree.Finally the others saw one today, trapped,tangled in our badminton net.The minute eyes shuddered deep in the creased facewhile his throat, strangely fierce, stretchedto release an extinct burning inside:pathetic loud whispers as four of usand the excited spaniel surrounded him.
Michael Ondaatje
I have dedicated my life to fight against the heinous rottenness of modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world's goods. But blow for blow I shall strike against Communism, because it robs us of the next world's happiness.
Charles E. Coughlin
It hurts to breathe. It hurts to live. I hate her, yet I do not think I can exist without her.
Charlotte Featherstone
...I don't want what other men see in you- you the you I want is invisible but it is the part of you I really love...
John Geddes
The closer you come to your authentic self, the simpler everything becomes. Listen to your intuition. It will tell you who you are.
Vironika Tugaleva
That's like being a hockey player born on January I.
Malcolm Gladwell
Time has become a melding of minutes and months and the feeling of seasons. […] Leon says it is the Bhutan Time Warp and I know what he means. Time does not hurl itself forward at breakneck speed here. Change happens very slowly. A grandmother and her granddaughter wear the same kind of clothes, they do the same work, they know the same songs. The granddaughter does not find her grandmother an embarrassing, boring relic.
Jamie Zeppa
How quickly pettiness returns, and that most ignoble form of real estate, the possessive occupation and tyranny over two square inches of human flesh, the wife's cunt.
Leonard Cohen