Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 93

Letting go of who you're supposed to be and discovering who you really are is a journey of many experiences, but certainty is not one of them. No matter how long you wait, it'll never feel safe enough. Plunge in anyway.
Vironika Tugaleva
Anybody is liable to rheumatism in her legs, Anne. It's only old people who should have rheumatism in their souls, though. Thanks goodness, I never have. When you get rheumatism in your soul you might as well go and pick out your coffin.
L.M. Montgomery
Nicolas walked toward him. Ignoring the presence of the others nearby, he took Julien's chin in his hand and kissed him tenderly on the lips. Julien seemed chagrined at first, and then accepted the gesture. It was sweet, and had the air of a couple that had been together for a great long time.Maric glanced away, embarrased by the intimacy, not to mention the fact that he hadn't quite realized the nature of the two warriors' relationship ealier. Not just comrades, then, and far more than close friend. The older Grey Wardens seemed unsurprised.
David Gaider
Then he said the funny thing was the old man himself had left home when he was a kid, after a fight with his own father. The father lit into him for using the wheelbarrow."It was this way. They always carried the feed to the horses, pail by pail. In the winter, when the horses were in the stalls. So my father took the notion to carry it to them in the wheelbarrow. Naturally it was a lot quicker. But he got beat. For laziness. That was the way they were, you know. Any change of any kind was a bad thing. Efficiency was just laziness, to them. That's the peasant thinking for you.
Alice Munro
Let it be emphasized once more, and especially to anyone inclined to a personally rewarding skepticism in these matters: for practical purposes, the financial memory should be assumed to last, at a maximum, no more than 20 years. This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant on previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to enter the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own innovative genius.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life. That is its job. Your job is to notice. First notice the difference. And then, every time, choose.
Michael Harris
...you can use words if you wish, but I'm warning you - I've learned how to read your heart ...
John Geddes
On the drive up here, I saw a goose," he says. "A Canada goose. Fred told me they shit something horrible. They migrate between the north and the south, don't they? Like seniors.
Brian Francis
What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
Margaret Atwood
…God is a giant quiltmaker. With an infinite variety of designs. And the quilt is grown so big and confusing, the pattern is impossible to see, the squares and diamonds and triangles don’t fit well together anymore, it’s all become meaningless. So He has abandoned it.
Rohinton Mistry
To love is easy and therefore common - but to understand - how rare it is!
L.M. Montgomery
The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.
Brion Gysin
Excerpt from Magel's Daughter:"I think we're all like the lutefisk, steeped in poison, and then we try to clean it up for Christmas.
Nancy Baker
The only currency that we really have to spend during our lives is time. Everything else is just a sub-category.
Stephen R. Bown
The sky pulsed with stars. Some people say it makes them lonesome when they stare up at the night sky. I can't imagine why. There's no shortage of company. By now there's not a constellation I can't name. Orion. Lupus. Serpens. Hercules. Draco. My father taught me all of their stories. So when I look up I see a galaxy of adventures and heroes and villains, all jostling together and trying to outdo one another, and I sometimes want to tell them to hush up and not distract me with their chatter. I've glimpsed all the stars ever discovered by astronomers, and plenty that haven't been.
Kenneth Oppel
That everything in nature has “the appearance” of design is not exactly evidence against design. According to Dawkins, though, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is almost certainly something else.
Paul Greene
Are all humans human? Or are some more human than others?
Roméo Dallaire
Give a hundred writers the same idea and you'll get a hundred different stories.
Joy Fielding
Her voice was flat, in a way Myrna recognized from years of listening to people trying to rein in their emotions. To squash them down, flatten, them, and with them their words and their voices. Desperately trying to make the horrific sound mundane.
Louise Penny
I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.
Jo Walton
He considered the hard times in his life. All the things he had been afraid of. All those years wasted, he told himself, because I was terrified of being different. That's why all us fifty-four-year-olds end up looking so much alike. All of us are terrified of being different.
Stuart McLean
Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to be true. You can really understand something when you know what it is not.
Steven Pinker
Ultimately, that’s what evil is . . . it’s something bad without an explanation. Which is why it’s terrifying. And as for mercy in the dark – well, what is salvation if not a light greater than all the shadows, something good which cannot be explained? It, too, can be terrifying. I doubt if men like Otto Brack, would dare look in its direction.
William Brodrick
Whether you’ve never meditated before or you’ve been doing it religiously for years, it is always good to evaluate (or re-evaluate) your practice. Although I’ve been meditating and teaching it for years, I still enjoy reading new information about it, learning new techniques, and checking out new meditation recordings. There is always something to learn because there are as many ways to meditate as there are people who are doing it.
Liberty Forrest
My travels inevitably begin with copious research and planning. I began this kind of planning long ago when I was very young and anxious to hit the road. Hours were spent pouring over junior encyclopedias memorizing the names of exotic-sounding cities---Addis, Ababa, Samarkand, Damascus. Lengthy lists were written detailing the most minute necessities: three pairs of socks, two pencils. spare batteries, rope.
Barbara Hodgson
No, my eldest brother. He was named after our father. Our parents died when the Romans first invaded, and Stephano then became the "head of the family". " She grimaced. "He and I are like oil and water. Or we were. We get along well enough now, though." She grinned. "But boy did he pitch a fit over the concubine thing. He even called in Uncle Lucian to deal with me."Harper's eyebrows rose. "I'm surprised Lucian bothered to intervene."..."Yes, well..." Drina grimaced. "I'm afraid while I was een as a concubine, I was really playing puppet master with my lover and kind of ruling the country though him. At least until Uncle Lucian caught wind of it and came to give me hell.
Lynsay Sands
You are still young enough to think that torment of the spirit is a splendid thing, a sign of a superior nature. But you are no longer a young man; you are a youngish middle aged man, and it is time you found out that these spiritual athletics do not lead to wisdom.
Robertson Davies
Ganelon sighed. "Slowhand...""Never again," Clay said. "Where you stand, I stand.
Nicholas Eames
When our hearts, minds, and souls are deep within the reality of living loved, we discover that most of those "rules" from Sunday school are simply our new characteristics and our family traits. They are the fruit born of a meaningful, life-changing relationship—they are the flowers of life in the Vine.
Sarah Bessey
...avacados, prickly pears and papayas used to be gulped down whole, seeds and all, by fridge-sized armadillos called glyptodonts.
Adam Leith Gollner
And yet I was filled with grief. In the beginning of all love there is grief, because at that moment you’re closest to the ghost of parting. You know how easily it could all slip away, how easily it could evaporate into eternal, never-to-be-consummated longing.
Edeet Ravel
No matter how many books I write, I will eventually get to fiction. That is where I'm going.
Neil Young
Unconditional love goes beyond holding on and letting go. Real love is about truth. It's about looking at what's really going on instead of the stories we tell ourselves about it. It's about being able to love someone from afar, when we need to, because we see that closeness turns us into the worst versions of ourselves.
Vironika Tugaleva
The ability to discipline yourself to delay gratification in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the long term, is the indispensable prerequisite for success.
Brian Tracy
Mothers can get weaned as well as babies.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton
An objection was made that judging what had already been done to me, if we proceeded some of us would most certainly be killed. And several others, each in their own language, countered that the way we were living here, the way we were treated, we might as well be dead already, that things couldn't get worse. Things can always get worse, someone yelled from the back, when you reach hell there is always another hell underneath.
Jacob Wren
He and Anna lay facing each other, Staines lying on his left hip, and Anna, on her right, both of them with their knees drawn up to their chests, Staines with one hand tucked beneath his bandaged shoulder, Anna with one hand tucked beneath her cheek. She must have turned toward him, some time in the night: her left arm was flung outward, her fingers reaching, her palm turned down...Devlin came closer...He looked down at Anna and Emery, their mirrored bodies, facing in. They were breathing in t
Eleanor Catton
...otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude. Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.
Margaret Atwood
The government is a giant logjam in the eternal river of human potential.
Stefan Molyneux
Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn’t exist at all: awareness. Nothing more than that. Just awareness—a vague, ethereal sense of being. Being . . . but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future—only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception . . .
Robert J. Sawyer
I wonder, what kind of life would I have had if it hadn’t been for my mother’s tea-and-cookie parties? Perhaps it’s because of them that I’ve never thought of women as my enemies, as territories I have to conquer, but always as allies and friends - which I believe is the reason why they were friendly to me in turn. I’ve never met those she-devils you hear about: they must be too busy with those men who look upon women as a fortress they have to attack, lay waste and left in ruins.
Stephen Vizinczey
The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their life.
Brian Tracy
Evolution is no longer just a theory; it has been proven true beyond a reasonable doubt. The problem is, even people who believe evolution is true disassociate themselves from the process. They somehow skipped all the lower forms of animal life and just started out at the top of the evolutionary ladder.The evidence says we evolved as life evolved.Human beings did not just appear at the top of the evolutionary ladder to reap the benefits of those millions of years of evolution without having to live through it.In other words, you were those other animals. Someone had to be them.You had to be lower animals to be a human now. You lived as all the different animals in your evolutionary line. You lived through millions of years, and millions of lives and deaths to get to where you are now. That's what Darwin's book means.
Michael Smith
[A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan.
Adam Gopnik
The both of us, we're individual parts on our own. She's the thunder and lightning and I'm the rain. It's only when we come together that it's right.We become the perfect storm. (Eric Carmen)
Melyssa Winchester
Memory is a barricade against forgetting; light is a bulwark against darkness; life is a flex against the stillness of the grave. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here, clear a space in all the debris, through all the anxieties and worries, where I can just exist, easily and simply, entire, for as long as I have left.
Helen Humphreys
Human beings aren't orchids we must draw something from the soil we grow in.
Sara Jeannette Duncan
If we seek the pleasures of love passion should be occasional and common sense continual.
Robertson Davies
Humor relieves the tension between what we see or desire but repress in order to sustain a survivable illusion about the world we live in. As such it's always potent stuff, and dangerous.
Lynda Williams
The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.
Steven Heighton
The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.
Margaret Atwood
If every mortal looks at others as their friends, not as their enemies, the world would be a much better place, wouldn't it?
Morgan Rhodes
She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belong to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.
William Gibson
And to think of all colors in the world, blood chose to be red." ~ The Fray Theory
Nelou Keramati
... the house is on fire, but go ahead - finish painting the verandah...
John Geddes
Your name may be 'writ in water', but for now, you have the great advantage of being a wave that can think.
D.J. MacLennan
If the iPhone gained traction, RIM’s senior executives believed, it would be with consumers who cared more about YouTube and other Internet escapes than efficiency and security. RIM’s core business customers valued BlackBerry’s secure and efficient communication systems. Offering mobile access to broader Internet content, says Mr. Conlee, “was not a space where we parked our business.
Sean Silcoff
At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?-Richard
Douglas Coupland
Old folks live on memory, young folk live on hope.
Gayla Reid
That’s what you get for being food.
Margaret Atwood