Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 36

A woman who has a sense of humor possesses no refuge from the merciless truth about herself. She cannot think herself misunderstood. She cannot revel in self-pity. She cannot comfortably damn any one who differs from her.
L.M. Montgomery
The keys to liberation are universal and essentially simple: disengage from all the stories you've been telling yourself about life and who you are or should be as you negotiate your way through, and all at once you know yourself as divine, all-powerful, unstoppable and magnificent, as any divine, all-powerful, unstoppable being would.
John C. Parkin
Congrats, buddy. It's going to be hysterical seeing you try to parent. You're a disaster.""Thanks, asshole," he says, but he's smiling because he sees the humor in my expression."I hope it's a girl and she grows up to be hot like her mom because that'll make it even more hysterical," I added and chuckle. "You're going to have to buy a baseball bat to keep the boys away.""Oh God, don't even joke about that," he warns.
Victoria Denault
Hurry wounds a questioning soul.
Sarah Bessey
The truth, in the right hands, can be a very flexible tool.
Gabriel Boutros
Sometimes, the scales of justice find a level of their own, without our help... And sometimes, in seeking justice, we don't always serve it.
Susanna Kearsley
You feel as if everybody has been given an instruction manual on how to be likable, but you didn’t get it. And they are all sold out now. And if you are what you eat, then you must have surely spent the last few years of your life eating dog food and cat shit. Because when you look in the mirror, it is all that you see.
Heather O'Neill
When you listen, it's amazing what you can learn. When you act on what you've learned, it's amazing what you can change.
Audrey McLaughlin
Better to be a catalyst for change than a martyr for lies.
Karina Halle
Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow.
Margaret Atwood
You are not by any manner of means the sort of woman I am in search of as a wife, and I am in a totally different universe from the husband you hope to find. But I feel a powerful urge to kiss you, for all that.
Mary Balogh
He knocks on doors and stands there. You’d be surprised how few doors get answered
Andrew Kaufman
Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.
Naomi Klein
I swear the man could seduce the holy mother!
Leigh Ann Edwards
It's stories that inspire people to change. It's stories that make them believe things can be better.
Sebastien de Castell
All the whackjob psychologists out there will tell you that grief is a process. Some say it has five stages. Others say that grief should only last two years at the lost, otherwise it's "abnormal". Putting an expiration date of grief though is like putting out the flame on a burning candle. It might stop the candle from melting down and falling apart, but in the long run the candle goes solid, freezes in a catatonic state. Take away a person's grief and guaranteed they'll only be a frozen shell of a human being afterwards. Grief is only love, it's nothing to hide or send away with happy pills and mother's little helpers. Grief is a lifeline connecting two people who are in different realms together, and it's a sign of loyalty and hope.
Rebecca McNutt
Many moral advances have taken the form of a shift in sensibilities that made an action seem more ridiculous than sinful, such as dueling, bullfighting, and jingoistic war. And many effective social critics, such as Swift, Johnson, Voltaire, Twain, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Tom Lehrer, and George Carlin have been smart-ass comedians rather than thundering prophets. What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword?Humor works by confronting an audience with an incongruity, which may be resolved by switching to another frame of reference. And in that alternative frame of reference, the butt of the joke occupies a lowly or undignified status. ...Humor with a political or moral agenda can stealthily challenge a relational model that is second nature to an audience by forcing them to see that it leads to consequences that the rest of their minds recognize as absur
Steven Pinker
An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now.
Margaret Atwood
Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
Malcolm Gladwell
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
Margaret Atwood
We all dream of being exactly what we are – powerful, beautiful, and worthy.
Vironika Tugaleva
No true love is possible, Lewis demonstrates, until we abandon our claims, our rights, our grievances. Until then we will be trapped in the obscurity of our heart's mixed motives, our will to possess, to control, to be our own gods.
Michael D. O'Brien
It was a lie and I detected it at once. As an accomplished fibber myself, I spotted the telltale signs of an untruth before they were halfway out of his mouth: the excessive detail, the offhand delivery, and the wrapping-up of it all in casual chitchat.
Alan Bradley
...you think so logically...like a hawk soaring - I feel so chaotically...like a kite without a tail plummeting to earth...
John Geddes
Knowing God is more than knowing about him; it is a matter of dealing with him as he opens up to you, and being dealt with by him as he takes knowledge of you. Knowing about him is a necessary precondition of trusting in him (‘how could they have faith in one they had never heard of?’ [Romans 10:4 NEB]), but the width of our knowledge about him is no gauge of the depth of our knowledge of him (pp. 39-40).
J.I. Packer
Don't let the fear of losing them keep you from loving them.
Nicole Williams
Politicians obfuscate. It gets them re-elected. If no-one can understand what is going on, then the perception is that we need someone to guide us through the fog. Many people want to be led. A few people even think that they need to be led.
Sieg Pedde
You cannot have an agency that defends your property, which also has the right to violate your property rights at will. That's like hiring a bodyguard that you pay to beat you up randomly.
Stefan Molyneux
Though I love your company, your instructions are wasted her. I will always choose the woman who caries me off, I will always sit with the family of loneliness.
Leonard Cohen
In every area of life everyone is capable of seeing from a higher perspective than they do now.You are never stuck. You're simply limited by the level you are seeing from.Limitation is always illustion. Just wait. Relax. Stay still. Wait until the wisdom talks to you, as it will. - Syd Banks
Sydney Banks
Sometimes it just feels really really wonderful to be alive.
Doug Coupland
I like to compare my mental stress capacity to a dinner plate. Most people have moderate amounts of stress in their life, like a nice balanced meal. The food represents different stresses that occur in our lives, past and present.
L.K. Elliott
The greatest tool of self-love is self-awareness. Once you truly know yourself, love is the only option.
Vironika Tugaleva
If we take the president of GM, they'll make us pay to give him back." (said by a kidnapper)
Owen Laukkanen
You can change the world again, instead of protecting yourself from it.
Julien Smith
I have made up my mind that I will never marry. I shall be wedded to my art.
L.M. Montgomery
If you ask me what remains to be known in the future, I’ll say, ‘Memorize all the world’s encyclopedias.’ Once you do that, forget all that fancy junk and rake the leaves – else I’m gonna take a stick to you, boy.
M.C. Humphreys
Stop. Talking."Her whisper was muffled against his lips, and his answering chuckle was muffled by hers."What would you have me do instead?""For starters? Put your mouth to better use.
Elle Kennedy
There is pleasure in reading a version of myself I know in my heart could never exist, since mine is not an iron mind coldly calculating every possible option and outcome. Instead I am a businessman who loves excitement, loves tension, loves risk and the unexpected, and just happens to possess an extraordinary, on occasion even miraculous, degree of good luck.
Jacob Wren
First we build the tools, then they build us.
Marshall McLuhan
I am part of a minority that is deeply misunderstood. People have very confused ideas about us. Many are frightened of us. I've even heard it said that many people wouldn't want their daughters or sons to marry one of us, and I know of people who have been denied jobs or promotions because they share this trait with me. But being what I am does not make me bad; being what I am does not make me dangerous; being what I am does not mean I don't love, or hurt, or have a sense of humor. My name is Malclom Decter, and I'm here today to tell the whole world what I am. ... I am an atheist.
Robert J. Sawyer
Tonight he would do anything in the world for her.Tomorrow he would begin to set her free.
Mary Balogh
the rape willtear youin halfbut it will notend you
Rupi Kaur
Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I'd look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I'd just feel a prayer.
L.M. Montgomery
People who couldn't imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn't need to imagine, because they already were. She'd said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which reminded her of what her mother had said about Corbell Picket. That evil wasn't glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.
William Gibson
Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.
Ann Voskamp
In the middle of nowhere, a trunk heavy with gold is a burden, not treasure.
A.J. Gallant
There are rules to the game but I don’t believe that we need to be bound by them. If it feels appropriate to follow the rules, then by all means, follow them. If it feels better to break the rules, be creative and do it.
Anne-Rae Vasquez
See yourself living in abundance and you will attract it. It always works, it works every time with every person" - Bob Proctor
Bob Proctor
Why is it that when people have no capacity for private usefulness they should be so anxious to serve the public?
Sara Jeannette Duncan
Oh, sometimes I think it is of no use to make friends. They only go out of your life after awhile and leave a hurt that is worse than the emptiness before they came.
L.M. Montgomery
There is a passion for perfection which you rarely see fully developed but... in successful lives it is never wholly lacking.
Bliss Carman
Peace is the fruit of love, a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work -- hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss -- loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.
Jean Vanier
It's not what you will get out of the books that is so enriching — it is what the books will get out of you that will ultimately change your life.
Robin S. Sharma
The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.
Lawrence M. Krauss
Every day when I open my eyes it is a leap of vibrational faith into something new
Debbie A. Anderson
He gazed up at the blue sky and knew that heaven—at least in this life—was neither a time nor a placeto be grasped and made into a possession. It came in fleeting moments and then went away again toleave one nostalgic and yearning and on the verge of tears.Very much on the verge of tears.And very frightened.
Mary Balogh
My problem is I say what I'm thinking before I think what I'm saying.
Laurence J. Peter
Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me.
Robertson Davies
I don't want to live in the kind of world where we don't look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I cant change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit.
Charles de Lint