Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 43

roughly 90 percent of songs have mating as their central theme, and this holds true regardless of cultural setting or historical period.
Gad Saad
Ideally, friends are people with whom we can be our true selves, with whom we can fearlessly let our guard down. (Arguably, a close friend is someone with whom we can allow ourselves to enter the daydreaming attentional mode, with whom we can switch in and out of our different modes of attention without feeling awkward.)
Daniel J. Levitin
When your elders are millennia-old demigods, you’d best take the injunction to respect your elders seriously.
Nalo Hopkinson
There is a world of difference between being clever and being right.
Ian Driscoll
Our essential difficulty is that we are seeking in a mechanism, which is necessary, qualities it simply does not possess. The market does not lead, balance or encourage democracy. However, properly regulated it is the most effective way to conduct business.It cannot give leadership even on straight economic issues. The world-wide depletion of fish stocks is a recent example. The number of fish caught between 1950 and 1989 multiplied by five. The fishing fleet went from 585,000 boats in 1970 to 1.2 million in 1990 and on to 3.5 million today (1995). No one thought about the long- or even medium-term maintenance of stocks; not the fishermen, not the boat builders, not the fish wholesalers who found new uses for their product, including fertilizer and chicken feed; not the financiers. It wasn't their job. Their job was to worry about their own interests.(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)
John Ralston Saul
The element of chance in basic research is overrated. Chance is a lady who smiles only upon those few who know how to make her smile.
Hans Selye
Canada reminds me of vichyssoise - it's cold half-French and difficult to stir.
Stuart Keate
You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else - to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know - because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint - Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?
Margaret Atwood
Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.
Steven Pinker
The idea that there is are all these people who are going to make all these great and wise decisions with guns. Because you know all the people who can make the best decisions in the world always want to be armed; because they are really smart, really wise, know exactly what should be done in society so naturally they want lots of guns. You get how insane that is right? The only people who want to force you to do stuff are people who know their ideas are shit to begin with. "It's a basic fact of life that anyone who wants to force you to do something means their ideas are shit to begin with. Not a lot of rapists are very good lovers because they don't have to sell quality; they got violence. Everyone is mad at Barack Obama's website from hell but they [the government] don't care because if you don't pay them they will throw you in jail. "The people with the best ideas are the most voluntary. The best parents don't beat their children. In fact if you beat your children you are saying 'I'm a shitty parent; I don't know what I'm doing and I'm pretty sadistic.' A rapist is saying I'm not a good boyfriend. Why do we even need to say this? People with guns are saying to your face, 'My ideas suck, I'm a bully, I get a thrill out of power so fucking do what I say or I'll shoot you in the ass.
Stefan Molyneux
There's a lot to be said for the fellow who doesn't say it himself.
Maurice Switzer
Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.
Margaret Atwood
I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.
Peter Watts
She felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. Afterward she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it. Now, however, she knows she wasn't being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It's a rare gift to under stand that you life is wondrous, and that it won't last forever.
Steven Galloway
Be together, in the moment of, enjoy each other, love each other, support each other, until the next time...Life is too short.
Lee Bice-Matheson
This is so cool," I said loudly as Dad walked away. "Have you met the tattoo artist? Is he hot?" "He's a she," Mom said. "Is she hot? Cause I'm still young, you know. My sexual identity isnt fully formed." "Your father can't hear you anymore, Maya." Mom sighed.
Kelley Armstrong
He'd shoved his toque and mitts into the sleeve of his parka when he'd come in the night before, and now, thrusting his right arm into the armhole, he hit the blockage. At a practiced shove the pompom of the toque crowned the cuff followed by his mitts, like a tiny birth.
Louise Penny
Spiritual": religion without any rules. All the comfort of fictitious friends with none of their demands.
Stefan Molyneux
Virginity is supposed to be something a girl gives up only when she is ready and feels comfortable, something a girl discusses at length with her friends and flip-flops over a million times in her mind before actually doing it. A guy is expected to be born ready.But what I realized after Tommy is that they're not. They're just as scared as their girlfriends, maybe even more so because the onus is on them to be gentle, make it last, make it memorable. And most of them haven't a clue.
Laurie Elizabeth Flynn
As much as I like it when a book I'm writing speeds along, the downside can be that an author becomes too eager to finish and rushes the end. The end is even more important than the first page, and rushing can damage it.
David Morrell
Achieving the state of SABLE is not, as many people who live with these knitters believe, a reason to stop buying yarn, but for the knitter it is an indication to write a will, bequeathing the stash to an appropriate heir.
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
Xander and Ethan are sex gods ALL THE WAY. —Nonna8359
Scarlett Avery
We need to make a game out of earning money. There is so much good we can do with money. Without it, we are bound and shackled and our choices become limited.
Bob Proctor
...that's the essence of me - I don't think, I feel - at best, I think-feel...
John Geddes
Even through the darkest phaseBe it thick or thinAlways someone marches braveHere beneath my skin
k.d. lang
Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but incompatible traits.
David Brooks
I visualized myself pulling on my mental thinking cap, jamming it down around my ears as I had taught myself to do. It was a tall, conical wizard's model, covered with chemical equations and formulae: a cornucopia of ideas.
Alan Bradley
But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
Alberto Manguel
What mortal knew the way their fate line would run?
Guy Gavriel Kay
There are two ways to taste things in life: the sweet way and the bitter way.
Rawi Hage
You like it when I play with your clit, baby?” —Bryce Van Der Linden (Never Say Never, Unbearable Passion, #1)
Scarlett Avery
The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?
Mary Balogh
Meet Jake — He’s illegally hot and his dirty-talking will make you dizzy!Meet Hunter— He’s outspoken, impulsive and a rugged piece of eye candy!These Two Alpha Billionaires Believe In Sharing...Everything!
Scarlett Avery
Optimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse 'in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God's own commitment, that the best is yet to come.
J.I. Packer
...they're here for a moment and then gone. At best they have "liftoff" power, or, to use a different analogy, they are like periodic flashes of lightning on a dark road, with no guiding power.
Ravi Zacharias
Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future.
Eric Berne
He smiled. "I suppose I thought we'd have a madly impractical, terrifyingly modern sort of marriage. One based on love. Not to mention dangerous undertakings and hair's-breadth escapes from burning buildings, high ledges and exploding sewers.""And bickering.""Always that, yes.""Assuming I want to marry at all.""True. I know of no good way of forcing you to do anything.""And you're mad enough to think it could work - one day?"He cupped her face in his hands. His smile was so brilliant it seemed to illuminate the room. "I think it would be heaven."She trembled, then. "You have a very strange idea of heaven.""Kiss me and see.
Y.S. Lee
I live in a constellation of intimates, and the shape of us is a family. We touch base and check in, with each other and also—I am so gratified to report—they sometimes check in with one another. Correspondences have sprung up and friendships have started to form beyond my influence. Family has begun to take on a transitive property as well.
S. Bear Bergman
...Tolstoy said, happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story - then what does that make us?...
John Geddes
The future is already here – it's just not evenly distri
William Gibson
She awoke knowing what she had been dreaming about. She was a deer in the headlights to his grinning face. In those first moments before she was fully awakened she hadn’t had time to hide her true feelings. He’d read them loud and clear. This was the moment that would start the seductive tango. There was one giant problem. Kayn could not dance her way out of a paper bag.
Kim Cormack
The key to abundance is acceptance. The more you expect, the less you accept.
L.J Vanier
It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, 'Read,' but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, 'Don't read, don't think, just write,' and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think 'There must be something else people do,' you won't quite be able to quit.
Alice Munro
You should stop by the shop. I'll make you up a special Welcome-To-Marietta chocolate basket for Samara. She'll love it."Of course. He should have thought of it himself. "She's got this salted caramel thing that will earn you major points," said Dawson. "the ladies love it.""I shouldn't say this in church." Sage looked down, and dropped her voice to a whisper. "But it's been called orgasmic."With that word, for a split second, everyone around him disappeared. Logan imagined putting a tiny square of rich, smooth candy onto Samara's tongue, watching her lips move as she savored it, kissing her, sharing the sweet, silky heat. What sound would she make when the flavor hit the back of her mouth? Would she moan? Would she ask for more? "It's a gift that keeps on giving," added Dawson, waggling his eyebrows.
Roxanne Snopek
Without a doubt, it [Canada] is the land God gave to Cain.
Mordecai Richler
We must become what we wish to teach.
Nathaniel Branden
My TV show enraged people. I had prostitutes on, and I treated them like real people.... I was fired from Maclean's after I wrote a piece called 'Let's Stop Hoaxing The Kids About Sex'. Now I'm the 'beloved author,' the 'beloved historian of Canada,' an icon. I get standing ovations.... I never set out to be a patriot or a popular historian. I just liked storytelling. [interview promoting Marching as to War (2002)]
Pierre Berton
It’s like everyone has their own little recipe for happiness, but no one really seems all that happy.
Brent Jones
I don't do romance, in the same way I don't do heroin Russian roulette, or nude alligator wrestling. I consider all of the above self-destructive, and demeaning and these are things up with which I will not put.
D.D. Barant
One thought follows on the other, they are not distinct objects with clear boundaries; rather, one thought anticipates the next and thereby contains it. The thought that comes afterward contains the memory or trace of the former. Thus, the movement of thought within the mind requires a mathematics of implicate forms.
F. David Peat
The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.
Steven Pinker
Stop crying to the ocean, stop crying over me. Stop worrying over nothing, stop worrying over me. So it's been so long since you said, well I know what I want and what I want's right here with you.
Tegan Quin
The joy and laughter and youth they brought was an antidote to the somberness enveloping his flat, the hours when he felt the very walls and ceilings were encrusted with the distress of of unhappy decades
Rohinton Mistry
Like preachers, I sell vision,like perfume ads, desireor its facsimile. Like jokesor war, it’s all in the timing.I sell men back their worse suspicions:that everything’s for sale,
Margaret Atwood
It is naive to think that self-assertiveness is easy. To live self-assertively--which means to live authentically--is an act of high courage. That is why so many people spend the better part of their lives in hiding--from others and also from themselves.
Nathaniel Branden
Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wantingSo much as just finding the gold.It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,It's the forests where silence has lease;It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,It's the stillness that fills me with peace.
Robert W. Service
The ear favours no particular “point of view.”We are enveloped by sound.It forms a seamless web around us.We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.”We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from “above,” from “below,” from in “front” of us, from “behind” us, from our “right,” from our “left.”We can‘t shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids.Where a visual space is an organised continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.
Marshall McLuhan
Even today, some opt for the comforts of mystification, preferring to believe that the wonders of the ancient world were built by Atlanteans, gods, or space travelers, instead of by thousands toiling in the sun. Such thinking robs our forerunners of their due, and us of their experience. Because then one can believe whatever one likes about the past - without having to confront the bones, potsherds, and inscriptions which tell us that people all over the world, time and again, have made similar advances and mistakes.
Ronald Wright
...I'm the last person to ask about unrequited love - I've run away to the Moon and fled to its valleys...
John Geddes
...I learn about the sacred in the everyday - I look in your face...
John Geddes