Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 40

It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible. And then use them against each other.
Geoff Ryman
It's like killing each other is the only thing we know how to do.
Faith Erin Hicks
Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)
Steven Heighton
I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.
Margaret Atwood
The fact is, the primary way that Ottawa and Washington deal with Native people is to ignore us. They know that the court system favors the powerful and the wealthy and the influential, and that, if we buy into the notion of an impartial justice system, tribes and bands can be forced through a long, convoluted, and expensive process designed to wear us down and bankrupt our economies.Be good. Play by our rules. Don't cause a disturbance.
Thomas King
The nose can’t help catchin’ what the ears get sick with. Yessir, rock bands just sweat evil. Evil’s been around for a long time, ever since rocks started getting real hot and making a lot of noise as they exploded out o’ the ground and evil spirits wisped out of hell. If a band ever uses a fog machine, hold your breath so you don’t become possessed by one.
M.C. Humphreys
By using repetition, images, and other strategies - all of which communicate truths in ways that are not cognitively or propositional - marketing forms us into the kind of persons who want to buy beer to have meaningful relationships, or to buy a car to be respected, or buy the latest thing to come along simply to satisfy the desire that has been formed and implanted in us. It is important to appreciate that these disciplinary mechanisms transmit values and truth claims, but not via propositions or cognitive means; rather, the values are transmitted more covertly...This covertness of the operation is also what makes it so powerful: the truths are inscribed in us through the powerful instruments of imagination and ritual.
James K.A. Smith
The value of taking risks through all stages of life is constant...it's the excuses that change.
Rik Leaf
We have fangirl shorthand.
Jacquelyn Middleton
She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?
Douglas Coupland
Don't apologize.""I wasn't-""Not in words, but it was clear from your tone. Apology suggests that you are keeping me from doing what I need to do, which implies I am somehow powerless to do otherwise. It's a choice, Olivia.
Kelley Armstrong
Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.
Peter Watts
I’ve always been a sort of self-imposed outsider, not a geeky outsider or a snobby outsider but, I just have a natural desire to live on the fringe. I’m not like a weirdo with a trench-coat but I just prefer to be alone or minimally surrounded by people.
Sara Quin
The habit of being uniformly considerate toward others will bring increased happiness to you.
Grenville Kleiser
To believe in the things you can see and touch is no belief at all. But to believe in the unseen is both a triumph and a blessing.
Bob Proctor
One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.
William Osler
To make it a crime for public institutions to serve the undocumented simply isolated people and drove them into poverty, she wrote. From then on, people who came looking for a library card received one, regardless of whether their papers were in order.
Lawrence Hill
To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success...with a society that provides opportunities for all.
Malcolm Gladwell
There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting.
L.M. Montgomery
Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon...
Margaret Atwood
It should be illegal to have such a hot little body as yours." —Bryce Van Der Linden Unbearable Passion (Book 1), Never Say Never
Scarlett Avery
Are you a female dog?""What?" Massie asked.
Lisi Harrison
Nobody with any real sense of humor *can* write a love story. . . . Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule. (90-91)
L.M. Montgomery
What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!
Cory Doctorow
Ah! the clock is always slow it is later than you think.
Robert W. Service
There is a crack in everything.That's how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.
Douglas Coupland
What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?
Peter Watts
The less approval I get, the more chances I have to develop a relationship with my inner sense of approval. Thankless environments are actually useful for this. They help me discover my own thankfulness and my own self-appreciation.
Vironika Tugaleva
When it comes to learning success, action is your school, and failure your teacher.
Majid Kazmi
When we love and respect people, revealing to them their value, they can begin to come out from behind the walls that protect them.
Jean Vanier
Whether it be in the sun, the rain, or the snow,You should always have fun, wherever you go.Think of all the amusing things you can do,To bring much laughter and happiness too.
Susanne Alexander-Heaton
As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,'' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me.
Margaret Atwood
Take the easy road and at the end, you will feel you have achieved nothing. Try the difficult shit and you’ll enjoy your successes.
Michael R. Fletcher
I hope that when the characters in my novels dream beyond their current circumstance, it inspires the reader to do the same.
Kristine Scarrow
Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.
Douglas Coupland
I do not desire power, but rather to submit to the will of Elamm’.
Benita J. Prins
I don't have expensive tastes – just bloody ones.– Vampire Dragul Mangorian
John Matsui
God punishes us mildly by ignoring our prayers and severely by answering them.
Richard J. Needham
Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.
Yann Martel
...there is a myth called objective reality - we think an impersonal world exists apart from us - it doesn't - it needs us to be ...
John Geddes
...I'm a modern mountebank - I believe in Physiognomy - after all, we are in control of our face - it's the map of where we've been...
John Geddes
It is fascinating to discover that individuals who are asked to assign a punishment to a criminal are influenced by factors that they are unaware of (like the presence of a flag in the room) or that they would consciously diavow (like the color of the criminal's skin). It is boring to find that individuals' proposed punishments are influenced by rational considerations such as the severity of the crime and the criminal's previous record. Interesting: we are more willing to help someonw if there is the smell of fresh bread in the air. Boring: we are more willing to help someone if he or she has been kind to us in the past. We sometimes forget that this bias in publication exists and take what is reported in scientific journals and the popular press as an accurate reflection of our best science of how the mind works. But this is like watching the nightly news and concluding that rape, robbery, and murder are part of any individual's everyday life - forgetting that the nightly news doesn't report the vast majority of cases where nothing of this sort happens at all.
Paul Bloom
Alana Marks had always known she was different. From her gypsy childhood, to the way she now made her living in the movies, she'd always lived on the edge. She'd been paid to leap from a sixteenth story window, roll a car to a cliff edge, get thrown off a speeding train and dragged into a river by a runaway horse. At the moment, she was about to set herself on fire and jump out of a burning barn.
Barbara Kyle
Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.
Jean Little
Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain.
Douglas Coupland
I’ve been alive a long time, long enough to know that the more baggage you carry in life, the more unstable you’ll be, until eventually you get sick of carrying it, and then you just fall down.
Rebecca McNutt
Putting in effort is like riding a bicycle on train tracks, you will get to where you want to go but you will feel every bump along the way.
Davis Levy
Expectations are made to be exceeded!
Lorii Myers
Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows they to be noble. They don't really have to think about it much; they sprout benevolent acts the way trees sprout leaves.
Margaret Atwood
He places a hand on either side of the bar, locking me in. 'And why won't you admit it?' he asks. I'm so startled by his new, gentler tone that I hazard a glance. My breath catches in my throat. Jared's eyes have changed to that sumptuous green, huge and mesmerizing, the pupils dilating like a cat's. I can't see to look away as he inches forward, until he's standing all but a hair's breadth away from me.
L.E. Sterling
But if a role model in her seventies isn't layered with contradictions - as we all come to be - then what good is she? Why bother to cut the silhouette of another's existence and place it against our own if it isn't as incongruous, ambiguous, inconsistent, and paradoxical as our own lives are?
Molly Peacock
Those who doubt themselves will doubt you. Those who limit themselves will try to limit you. Do not fight them. Smile, go your own way, and trust that your example is enough.
Vironika Tugaleva
The Piper is coming nearer," he said, "he is nearer than he was that evening I saw him before. His long, shadowy cloak is blowing around him. He pipes - he pipes - and we must follow - Jem and Carl and Jerry and I - round and round the world. Listen - listen - can't you hear his wild music?
L.M. Montgomery
Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world. Don't let anything stand in the way of the light that shines through this form. Risk being seen in all of your glory.
Jim Carrey
Don't let a three-o'clock-at-night feeling fog your soul.
L.M. Montgomery
It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian... All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse. There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception. There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored.
Marshall McLuhan
When the white man came we had the land and they had the bibles. Now they have the land and we have the bibles.
Chief Dan George
Tax is not a four-letter word; rather, it's the price we pay for the country we want.
Alex Himelfarb
I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don't want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.
Charles de Lint