Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 51

Blood doesn't make a family.
E.C. Sheedy
By the time the last few notes fade, his hope will be restored, but each time he's force to resort to the Adagio it becomes harder, and he knows its effect is finite. There are only a certain number of Adagios left in him, and he will not recklessly spend this precious currency.
Steven Galloway
...I'm not afraid of the opinions of others - but of being needed and coming up short ...
John Geddes
Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.
Emma Donoghue
We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.
B.W. Powe
. . . [T]o live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness - without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit holds its breath and hopes to be immortal because it does not live - is no longer a rarefied project. Just as machinery has embodied ideas of good, so the technology of destruction has also acquired a metaphysical character. The practical questions have thus become the ultimate questions as well. Annihilation is no longer a metaphor. Good and Evil are real. The inspired condition is therefore no visionary matter. It is not reserved for gods, kings, poets, priests, shrines, but belongs to mankind and to all of existence.
Saul Bellow
The trust I have...for some people...comes down to how well I know them, and then it's a matter of my trusting them to do what I think they're going to do.
Steven Erikson
If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way—who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites—it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking rapid cognition seriously--acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impression play in our lives--requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.
Malcolm Gladwell
The emergency of women is the emergency of the world.
Sina Queyras
Finally he must have noticed his vice grip on Austin, because he made a disgusted face and threw Austin’s arms down. “I am the Dom here. I am in charge,” he insisted, but then all the anger left his voice. “And being in charge means controlling myself—my own urges—too. Maybe more so than I ever try to control you.” He petted Austin’s hair. Leaned in to press their foreheads together briefly, the way he always did when he was overcome with one of those emotions he refused to tell Austin about.
Heidi Belleau
In the global marketplace of the future the price of every product will tell the ecological truth.
Kalle Lasn
But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.
Margaret Atwood
I have fallen in love with the stories of our lives, our everyday mythologies. How will they unfold? What will become of us?
D.J. MacLennan
The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.
Emily St. John Mandel
The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not worshipped; it is our future in which we will find our greatness.
Pierre Trudeau
There’s a time when it all comes together—what you long for and what you fear—and as tentative as you may feel, you’re driven to continue. At that point, the need to forge ahead is the only option, and your direction is defined despite yourself.
Lorii Myers
If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.
Paul Watson
Then the shit hit the fan.
John Kenneth Galbraith
As long as we’re alive and interacting with life, the world, and the people around us, we’ll have something to say.
David duChemin
I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.
Margaret Atwood
Sound the tocsin of national peril and hordes of well-meaning folk with nothing much to do always materialize from nowhere. They itch to meddle in great matters of which their comprehension is usually pretty dim, and have no objection to getting their names and pictures in the papers.
Leslie McFarlane
The guns reminded me that this was just an attempt to punch holes in the darkness that enveloped us now.
Michael Poeltl
Do What?' 'Lie,' he said. 'Why do you fabricate these outlandish stories?''Well,' I wanted to say, 'there are those of us who create because all around us, things visible and invisible are crumbling. We are like the stonemasons of Babylon, forever working, as it says in Jeremiah, to shore up the city of walls.'I didn't say that, of course. What I did say was: 'I don't know.
Alan Bradley
Peter." The fine hair along her spine rising, Vicky could feel the power in a name. This is who you are, it said. Come back to us.
Tanya Huff
Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory,Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? 'Done things' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul? Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders?(You'll never hear it in the family pew.) The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things–Then listen to the wild–it's calling you.
Robert W. Service
With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything...
Saul Bellow
In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves.
Douglas Coupland
This bastard was in a self-help program? For what? Square-jawed, cleft-chin sufferers? Handsome Bastards Anonymous?
Susan Juby
How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?
David Brooks
I suspect that much of life is like that. We seldom see what is closest to our eyes.
Jack Whyte
This day is not a sieve, losing time. With each passing minute, each passing year, there's this deepening awareness that I am filling, gaining time. We stand on the brink of eternity.
Ann Voskamp
What should I get from books?” Alcide asked in French.That you are not alone — even along this broken tractor road. You need to know nothing else,” my father answered in French.
David Adams Richards
A great relationship is being with the one who compliments your madness instead of conflicting with it.
Marnie Grundman
Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and the junk food as far away as possble.
Krista Scott-Dixon
To live in the present, you need to act or accept but never stay stuck.
John Kuypers
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.
Margaret Atwood
If solitude feels painful, it's only because we don't know how to be alone.
Michael Harris
Your life. Your choices. People will give you endless opinions on how you should live your life and who you should be. Don't allow them. Don't listen. This is your life.
Akiroq Brost
...don't settle for pap - our thoughts wander through eternity - experience the wonder of being alive...
John Geddes
Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't bear. The strong can forget, can shut out history. Very good. Even if it is self-flattery to speak of strength--these aesthetic philosophers, they take a posture, but power sweeps postures away. Still, it's true you can't go on transposing one nightmare into another, Nietzsche was certainly right about that. The tender-minded must harden themselves. Is this world nothing but a barren lump of coke? No, no, but what sometimes seems a system of prevention, a denial of what every human being knows. I love my children, but I am the world to them, and bring them nightmares. I had this child by my enemy. And I love her. The sight of her, the odor of her hair, this minute, makes me tremble with love. Isn't it mysterious how I love the child of my enemy? But a man doesn't need happiness for himself. No, he can put up with any amount of torment--with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair. And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.
Saul Bellow
At first first nothing will happen to usand later on it will happen to us again.
Leonard Cohen
Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.
Yann Martel
Practicing security means continually turning towards the best version of yourself.
Eve Rickert
There was five golden rules. My dad made me write them over and over until I knew them like I knew my own name...Number five: never have a fire in the daytime, 'cause people could see the smoke and come and get us.Number four: if I ever see anyone other than my dad, I run, and keep running.Number three: always say my prayers, so as God don't get mad at me and decide to come make me sick too.Numer two: never forget to pray for my momma, 'cause she was the best and prettiest lady God ever made.Number one: never, ever leave the woods.
Jeff Lemire
suffering breaks us until there’s nothing left but gentleness
John Geddes
Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
Elon Musk
All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.
Brian Tracy
Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school.
Naomi Klein
That is one of the great gifts of The Evolution of Us. Vulnerability. Christine finds it in the women she interviews, and then offers it openly from herself, too. We learn through her writing to live moment to moment, to embrace our insecurities, and to lean on one another… Lauree Ostrofsky, CPCSimply Leap, LLC
Christine Woodcock
Things work out better when you're straight up.
Kate Jacobs
There is no sobornost without crucifixion, because it is through pain that one acquires that deep knowledge that has nothing to do with books and education… that deep knowledge that is given by God and by God alone that builds the foundation of unity. People thus united are transparent, and it is in those depths that one finds, I repeat, the foundation of sobornost… of unity.
Catherine de Hueck Doherty
All I've ever wanted was a place to belong, and someone to belong to.
Donna Alward
...good words - that triumphalism of positivity- but life will claw and eat you - chew you over and over - if you carry such a small knife ...
John Geddes
Bellusdeo laughed. It was, for a moment, the only sound in the quiet of the fief’s night, and it was warmer and deeper than the lingering night chill. When her laughter faded, she glanced at Kaylin. “I was not like this before. I thought that the Shadows had not touched me.” She lowered her head a moment.Kaylin understood this, as well. “It seems so unfair,” she finally said.“Life is unfair. Which part of it pains you?”“We suffer, and it breaks something. When we win free—by gaining our name, by crossing a bloody bridge—we still live in a cage of scars. If life were fair, we would never have suffered what we suffered at all; having suffered it and survived, we’re still reacting to things that don’t exist anymore.”“But they did.”“Yes. I hate that they still define me.” Voice lower, she said to Bellusdeo, “I want that to change. I don’t know how to change it. But I’m willing to spend the rest of my life trying.” Shaking her head, she forced herself to smile; it was surprisingly easy. There was something about Bellusdeo that she liked. “Home is a strange thing.”“What do you mean?”“We lose it, and we think it’s gone forever. That’s how I felt the first time I lost mine. It took me years to understand that I could find—and make—another. I couldn’t do it on my own, though; I don’t think—for me—home exists in isolation.
Michelle Sagara West
He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish.
John Vaillant
The body of Christ is about doing life together, and by doing life together sin is revealed.
James MacDonald
People who are humble about their own nature are moral realists. Moral realists are aware that we are all built from “crooked timber”— from Immanuel Kant’s famous line, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
David Brooks
So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.
Margaret Atwood
You forget, darling. the local psychopath.
Kelley Armstrong
I'll love you forever,I'll like you for always,As long as I'm livingmy baby you'll be.
Robert Munsch