Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 4

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
Alberto Manguel
To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two...2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there...
Jane Jacobs
Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time
Anne Michaels
Like all great adventures, this one started with someone trying to get laid. King Menelaus didn’t go to Troy for the baklava.
Mark Leiren-Young
...Moonlight possesses no alchemy to transmute good motives to base, but it does excite love magic...
John Geddes
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.
Margaret Atwood
What the society thinks is of no interest to me. All that's important is how I see myself. I know who who I am. I know the value of my work.
Robin S. Sharma
Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.
Margaret Atwood
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.
William Gibson
The search for the soul mate, the perfect partner to complete you, is a bit like searching for the perfect food when you’ve got a giant ulcer in your stomach. No matter what you find, it will never be good enough.
Vironika Tugaleva
All positive interactions with other human beings involve, to some degree, the experience of visibility-- that is, the experience of being seen and understood.
Nathaniel Branden
Demons would often try to make me feel some negative emotion, like hatred or contempt. Because the only way I could become vulnerable to them, is if I indulged in some negative emotion, in their presence. In the realm of hatred and anger, and other negative emotions, demons are the masters.
Alexei Maxim Russell
The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.
Margaret Atwood
Liv grabbed the cookie nearest her and broke it open.“It's up to you to make your happy ending.”Liv stared at it a moment, rereading the words. Did it mean life? Because if it did, then Liv disagreed. Sometimes life was downright unfair. Bad things happened to good people.
Danika Stone
Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic 'rights,' [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude: Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our urban schools terrorist training camps, our legislatures brothels where rights are sold to the highest electoral bidder.
D A Carson
...the best way to forgive someone is to enter into their sufferings ...
John Geddes
In life, every experience of a peak always follows the experience of a valley and we go back and forth between them. […] Until you understand that both the peaks and the valleys are inevitable and will eventually pass, and you disidentify from both sides, you will miss seeing your unmoving center, which is untouched by your thoughts, feelings or experiences.
Mada Eliza Dalian
I must do whatever I can to find the best partners possible." "Did you kick their butts?" He frowned. "The buttocks are among the least sensitive places to hit someone." I laughed. "It's a figure of speech." "To kick butts. Interesting.
Allison van Diepen
Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again
Michael Ondaatje
No man ever truly possesses a woman, anyhow," said Gidas moodily. "He has her body for a time if he's lucky, but only the most fleeting glimpse into her soul." Gidas was a poet, or wanted to be.
Guy Gavriel Kay
. . . for any worthwhile martial arts skill to be pragmatic, it has to be done live, otherwise it is of limited or no use in actual combat
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
He is my unicorn, though... That's how I felt falling in love with him, as if I'd found a creature of myth.
Rivka Galchen
So what is the fallout for dogs of the Lassie myth? As soon as you bestow intelligence and morality, you bestow the responsibility that goes along with them. In other words, if the dog knows it’s wrong to destroy furniture yet deliberately and maliciously does it, remembers the wrong he did and feels guilt, it feels like he merits a punishment2, doesn’t it? That’s just what dogs have been getting - a lot of punishment. We set them up for all kinds of punishment by overestimating their ability to think. Interestingly, it’s the “cold” behaviorist model that ends up giving dogs a much better crack at meeting the demands we make of them. The myth gives problems to dogs they cannot solve and then punishes them for failing. And the saddest thing is that the main association most dogs have with that punishment is the presence of their owner. This puts a pretty twisted spin on loooving dogs ‘cause they’re so smart, doesn’t it?
Jean Donaldson
Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.
Omar El Akkad
Gentle whispers from above Awakened me more Than ever did This loud world
Holly Ducarte
Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying.
R. Scott Bakker
Men who look young act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young-but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution what would be excessive in their grandfathers-are the curses of the world.
Robertson Davies
Moon, moon, rise in the sky to be a reminder of comfort and the hour when I was brave.
Elizabeth Smart
by confusing life with play-acting and play-acting with life, one may perhaps construct a tolerable moral world from shattered fragments of the past
William Hardy McNeill
Do one thing today to move yourself towards a big goal. Repeat tomorrow, and the next day. You'll be surprised at how fast you'll attain it!
Lorraine Reguly
My first jailbreak began when a coarse-toothed mechanic’s file crashed through the window of the Deeper Harbour PoliceStation at two in the morning. The file bounced three or four times before clattering to a halt among a scatter of shattered glass. The file spun a little and came to rest, like a compass needle pointing somewhere far off the edge of the map. Looking back from right here and right now I believe I would like to start this story right then—three days after I had just turned fourteen—spending my birthday in jail. - SINKING DEEPER
Steve Vernon
Dullness is a misdemeanor.
Ethel Wilson
What you're missing is that the path itself changes you.
Julien Smith
And as if he had read her thoughts, the old man murmured, 'What a blessing it is to die in your own bed, under your own roof, with your family surrounding you, full of the knowledge that you have lived as thoroughly as you wanted to.
Anita Rau Badami
Lou could imagine Rich hiding within. She closed her eyes, letting her mind wander, search, and finally focus on him. Hurry up, Rich, she thought. Feeling the tug of connection, a thrill of anticipation ran up her spine. Lou didn't let herself nudge events often, but she did it today.
Danika Stone
The highest paid Americans read an average of two to three hours per day. The lowest paid Americans don't read at all......58% of adults never read another book after they leave high school—including 42% of university graduates......43.6% of American adults read below the 7th grade level... they are functionally illiterate... fully 50% of high school graduates cannot read their graduation diplomas, nor fill out an application form for a job at McDonald’s...
Brian Tracy
I had met death before, in different forms--I knew quite well the pattern of my grieving. First came shock, and then tears, and then a bitter anger, followed by a softer grief that time would wear away.
Susanna Kearsley
T.H. moved through the forest like the melody of a well-known song, in perfect harmony with his surroundings.
Charles de Lint
Set a goal to achieve something that is so big, so exhilarating that it excites you and scares you at the same time.
Bob Proctor
Irish improves a poet.
Sina Queyras
People tend to want to live up to their friends’ high regard.
David Brooks
I want to encourage you by letting you know that there’s hope for you and your situation whatever you are dealing with. God is intimately involved with every detail of your future and His desire is for you to be an overcomer.
Sue Augustine
The stupid girl thinks Muslim is a language.
Jill Ciment
Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing…sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.
Charles de Lint
The desire to be loved, to feel loved, is behind every diet, pill, surgery, and lie. It is behind each act of violence and every affair as well as each organized religion and every method of self-help.
Vironika Tugaleva
There's that thing that can happen to you when you meet somebody and you don't consider them extraordinary at all and then they do something like play the cello or write amazing poetry or sing and suddenly you look at them completely differently.
Yvonne Prinz
She was determined to keep her promise of 'no fandom' to her mother. Trouble was, fandom was more than a hobby, it was a support system. Without it, Liv had no one to talk to when she was lonely. She had nothing to look forward to after school, and no outlet for creativity. Liv found herself spiraling back into melancholy. She got up. She went to classes.She came home... And then did it all over again. Sleep became the escape that fandom had once been.
Danika Stone
Because God is trustworthy, you need not let worry steal your joy for one more day. With God as your leader, even when confusion is at its peak, there can always be a certainty in your uncertainty. To be certain of God’s character and His goodness to us means that we can look uncertainty in the eye and even flourish in it. Worry can be transformed into excited anticipation of what is to come." (Life Hacks, p.35)
Jon Morrison
[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.
David Brooks
Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too--a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here. As a kid, I grasped that the skyline was a sign that could be, so to speak, relocated to New Jersey--a kind of abstract, receding Vision whose meaning would always be "out of reach," not a concrete thing signifying "here you are." Even when we are established here, New York still seems a place we aspire to. Its life is one thing--streets and hot dogs and brusqueness--and its symbols, the lights across the way, the beckoning skyline, are another. We go on being inspired even when we're most exasperated.
Adam Gopnik
The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.
Charles de Lint
Doesn't love have to be tested by reality and time, or else isn't it only a dream?
Jo Beverley
I believe that the best leadership is loud authenticity. That is what the world needs now. We don’t need more plastic, Photoshopped perfection. I don’t want people to look at me and wish they could be me. I want people to be more accepting of their own failures, imperfections, and struggles because they are inspired by how I accept my own.
Vironika Tugaleva
getting over it/ just means getting around it/ and sometimes/ you gotta go through it/ leave it torn and blasted apart
Shane L. Koyczan
The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.
Northrop Frye
We can do so much if we just Believe in our own potential.
Akiroq Brost
Transcendence is transformation.
Peter Watts
It don't matter about all that anyway," Armstrong added. "You think it do, but it don't. A man ain't just his one talent. Lil Louis needs you. And Jones look to you like you his brother. You got the talent of making others your kin, your blood. Music, well that's different. I reckon it got its own worth, but it ain't a man's whole life.""Aww hell, Louis," I thought. "Ain't nothing else I want.
Esi Edugyan
That which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave.
Ann Voskamp
Ah men,why do you want all this attention?I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutelynecessary. What do you have to offer meI can't find otherwiseexcept humiliation? Which I no longerneed.
Margaret Atwood