Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 62

If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one's self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the face of the world.
Alan Bradley
Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe.
Steven Pinker
Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it
Margaret Atwood
You know I love you. You're the only one.""She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them.
Margaret Atwood
The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love.
Mary Balogh
It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.
Eckhart Tolle
You are nature. You are already perfect, peaceful, and powerful. You don’t need to become anything. You simply need to remember yourself.
Vironika Tugaleva
Know that the same spark of life that is within you, is within all of our animal friends, the desire to live is the same within all of us...
Rai Aren
It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places of her life, like a familiar cafe that exists someone outside geography and beyond time zones. There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F:, and some muchlarger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat. But there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. the hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counmter-purposes, deter her.
William Gibson
Somebody’d better pray for him, don’t you think? He IS a lost soul.~Pastor John Linton
Janet Sketchley
We also serve who only punctuate.
Brian Moore
An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth.
Mary MacLane
…because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world.
Alan Bradley
Communication is like a pressure relief valve for your body. When a little pressure gets cooked up inside and needs to be released, you can gently turn the nozzle and release it slowly and gracefully until you feel better, by way of a productive conversation. But if you choose to ignore the warning signals and leave that pressure inside, it's going to grow and inevitably explode and make a mess, by way of an overreaction and possibly an argument.
L.K. Elliott
Did she answer my email yet?' That's the new obesity.
Tom Rachman
No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn.
Steven Pinker
Everyone's life matters and everyone deserves to be happy but not everyone is in a place where they think, or even believe, happiness is possible.
Cheryl B. Evans
Whether something is wonderful or horrible, the most harmful thought we can think is “Will this last forever?
Vironika Tugaleva
The biggest mistake people make when trying to be authentic is just that: they try. They see these role models of what an "authentic" person is supposed to look like or act like, and they try to emulate that. Authenticity isn't about what things appear to be. It's about allowing things to be what they are. Authenticity is about getting away from hiding, from wearing a mask, from always asking, "How should I act? What should I say? What will people think?" That includes asking, "How should an authentic person act? What would a genuine person say?"Being authentic isn't about making yourself a certain way. It's not even about finding out what you "really" enjoy as opposed to what other people enjoy, or who you "really" are as opposed to who other people are. Authenticity is allowing your likes, dislikes, personality, appearance, hobbies, and beliefs to be fluid, to change, to evolve as you learn, grow, and experience the world.At its core, authenticity is the practice of surrendering the tiresome task of keeping up appearances and taking up of the lifetime work of allowing what is already within you to come out while you remove as many internal and external obstacles as possible.And who knows what will spill out of you if you just allow it to? Who knows what is within you awaiting recognition, awaiting permission to show itself to the world? Even you don’t know—until you try. Or, rather, until you stop trying. Until you become curious.
Vironika Tugaleva
She thought often of her own death, but without fear, loss having been her only belonging in this life. For years, acceptance had been her only means of survival. She knew that no matter how miserable or wretched life became, all she could do with her meek piece of time was sustain it. Decades of guilt, lost faith, the betrayal by those few people she'd let herself love - it was worth enduring these things, if only for the gift of a single, exalted moment. And such moments happened, even frequently, in the lives of people wise enough to see them.
Esi Edugyan
Destiny's Gate is filled with darkness and light. If you identify with the darkness, this is a good sign as we all have to embrace the darkness within us in order to heal and be brought into the Light as One.
Lee Bice-Matheson
Happy? Most of the time? Happiness is always a fleeting thing," he said, "It never rests upon anyone as a permanent state, though many of us persist in believing in the foolish idea that if this would just happen or that we would be happy for the rest of our lives. I know moments of happiness just as most other people do. Perhaps I have learned to find it in ways that would pass some people by. I feel the summer heat here at this moment and see the trees and the water and hear that invisible gull overhead. I feel the novelty of having company when I usually come here alone. And this moment brings me happiness.
Mary Balogh
The noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep.
Saul Bellow
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
John Kenneth Galbraith
They rode up the faint marks of the old trace where thousands of sojourners walking and riding both had crossed it and before them the buffalo far back in time. She joined the stream of humanity that had gone down that road, just one more story in a stream of narratives both likely and unlikely that were being told somewhere even now, by someone, in a far place.
Paulette Jiles
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one.
Margaret Atwood
She slept a dreamless sleep free of dragons for she had slain them once again. The Children of Ankh
Kim Cormack
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
John Kenneth Galbraith
We want more than there is.
Jonathan Goldstein
It's just so sad what we're willing to do for the Joey Spinellis of the world, you know?The mutilating, the tweezing, the enhancing, the plumping, the pinching, the waxing, the starving, the sweating, the bleaching. And for what? So you can wake up next to THAT in thirty years? What are we thinking??
Yvonne Prinz
Failure is usually boring. It is the credible but unrealized threat of failure that is interesting.
Robin D. Laws
Imagine a psychiatrist sitting down with a broken human being saying, I am here for you, I am committed to your care, I want to make you feel better, I want to return your joy to you, I don't know how I will do it but I will find out and then I will apply one hundred percent of my abilities, my training, my compassion and my curiosity to your health -- to your well-being, to your joy. I am here for you and I will work very hard to help you. I promise. If I fail it will me my failure, not yours. I am the professional. I am the expert. You are experiencing great pain right now and it is my job and my mission to cure you from your pain. I am absolutely committed to your care... I know you are suffering. I know you are afraid, I love you. I want to cure you and I won't stop trying to help you. You are my patient. I am your doctor. You are my patient. Imagine a doctor phoning you at all hours of the day and night to tell you that he or she had been reading some new stuff on the subject of whatever and was really excited about how it might help you. Imagine a doctor calling you in an important meeting and saying listen, I'm so sorry to bother you but I"ve been thinking really hard about your problems and I'd like to try something completely new. I need to see you immediately! I"m absolutely committed to your care! I think this might help you. I won't give up on you.
Miriam Toews
War of words. We are influenced by the western media. But is what we hear the truth or just PR campaigns for governments?
Anne-Rae Vasquez
Somehow it felt familiar, an old story retold, the claws in my shoulder, my arms twisted behind my back, the drag down the street, Will assisting my father and thinking how much fun it was to hunt someone down. I knew it all. Each snarled command was a line from an old but faithless song. “Pipe down! I’m not going to hurt you! I just want to talk to you! This is for your own good!
Kaimana Wolff
Everything can be summed up into an equation.
Alexei Maxim Russell
To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities.
Jane Jacobs
He was struck dumb by her brilliant blue eyes. Eyes that could drag a man out of the darkest hole and into the light.
J.K. Coi
People told her she hadn't changed much, in a tone which hinted they were surprised and a little disappointed she hadn't.
L.M. Montgomery
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.
Eckhart Tolle
The only times she ever felt at peace now were at his concerts. Then she could sit quietly, watching him, and sate her heart. In his music was where he lived and revived, and where she'd first loved him. And she knew, always, always when she was there, that he played for her.
Vivien Shotwell
Why do you do this?” she asked.“Do what?”“Follow me around. Look at me as if you find me fascinating. Touch me, and say nice things to me. And then, you pull away as if you did nothing at all.” She gave him a self-deprecating smile. “I’ve already agreed to tell you everything I know. There’s no need for these games.
Paula Altenburg
We should try to bring to any power what we have as women. We will destroy it all if we try to imitate that absolutely unfeeling driving ambition that we have seen coming at us across the desk.
Colleen Dewhurst
Once a man began thinking with his body, intelligent decisions came few and far between.
Tanya Huff
I had forgotten such innocence exists,/forgotten how it feels/ to live with neither calendars nor clocks
P.K. Page
They could take the money from building enough nukes to kill all the Russians in the world and give it to libraries. What good does an independent nuclear deterrent do Britain, compared to the good of libraries?
Jo Walton
To want is to have a weakness.
Margaret Atwood
Dad was thirsty, not given to great displays of affection, like his father and his father's father before him. A long line of self-indulgent men who couldn't give love but lived to take it, which isn't the same as receiving it. They were all in so much pain and that's always the perfect excuse.
Courtney Summers
There's always one sure way of finding out that you're a misfit. When you're eleven years old, and your friends are telling you that they just sneaked into the theater to watch 'Twilight' and that it was "sooooo emotional and sooooo terrifying and soooooo romantic!" - but you've been spending the summer watching 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Don't Look Now' and knowing the lines to all the Alfred Hitchcock films by heart - that's the moment you realize that you're a misfit.
Rebecca McNutt
Live today as if there will be many tomorrows!
Lorii Myers
Shoot for the biggest and boldest impact possible.If you need a full corporate makeover—do it. Moderation is just not going to cut it.
Lorii Myers
For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences.
Malcolm Gladwell
No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.
Saul Bellow
Honor is a fool's prize. Glory is of no use to the dead.
Drew Karpyshyn
Who are you and how did you get in here?" "I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.
Leslie Nielsen
To consume the best for yourself and give the crumbs to God is blasphemy. A heart that truly worships is a heart that gives its best to God in time and substance. A heart that truly worships God gives generously to the causes of God---causes that God cares deeply about. I have to wonder whether someday we may wake up to discover that all our incestous spending on ourselves and our frantic construction of excessively luxurious places of worship---even as we ignore, for the most part, the hurting and the deprived of the world---filled God's heart with pain.
Ravi Zacharias
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
Michael Ondaatje
God trained Moses in a palace to use him in a desert. He trained Joseph in a desert to use him in a palace.
Ravi Zacharias
If now in some ways I drink too much, it’s not that I lack a reverence for the world.
Sheila Heti
Words were numbers were codes were formulae. Words held secret maps, the measuring of paces, the patterns of mortal minds, of histories, of cities, of continents and warrens.
Steven Erikson
Government in the last analysis is organised opinion. Where there is little or no public opinion there is likely to be bad government which sooner or later becomes autocratic government.
William Lyon Mackenzie King