Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 94

There is no greater suffering than constantly measuring yourself and coming up short, except perhaps the realization that your suffering is hurting others. But where do we learn these things? Because, really, they are learned. We don't come crying out of the womb because of our birth weight or because we have no money in this brand new world. We learn to measure and we learn to attach our self-worth to those measurements.These patterns we're stuck in aren't just painful for us, they're also distracting us. Every day, the gap between rich and poor grows while the people of developed societies do nothing, because we are too busy worrying about looking good. We're distracted, but not because we've chosen to be. Being distracted by our illusory inadequacy keeps us from changing the world. And believe me, we all have the power to change the world. If we only make the time. If we only free some head space.If you can't learn to love yourself for yourself (and how could you with such a paradoxical motivation?)... then do it for us. Do it for the world. We need you. We need your mind. We need your attention. We need your thoughts. Change your focus, and you will (not can, but will) change the world. You already matter. You just have to realize it for yourself.
Vironika Tugaleva
People who don't like cats always seem to think there is some peculiar virtue in not liking them.
L.M. Montgomery
...a little "appreciation" sometimes does quite as much good as all the conscientious "bringing up" in the world.
L.M. Montgomery
With Nectar in your Mind instead of Thinking, you have Understanding and Wisdom
John de Ruiter
Always ask yourself the question "Is this going to help get me to my goal or not?
Bob Proctor
Labor is sacrificed on the inflation rates altar of oblation.
Richard Gwynn
But giving up's easy. You know what's hard? To believe in your own worth, to know you've got something special in you even if nobody else can see it. Even when you can't.
Ryan North
I had said that Le Guin's worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they would be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it's rare in SF.
Jo Walton
Darkness entered into, darkness realized, is the point of departure for all profound expressions of Christian hope. 'Meaningless darkness' becomes 'revelatory darkness' when it is confronted by the courage of a thoughtfulness and hope that is born of faith's quest for truth.
Douglas John Hall
When prescribing one of the drugs I take, my doctor warned me of a common side effect: exaggerated, intensely vivid dreams. To be honest, I've never really noticed the difference. I've always dreamt big.
Michael J. Fox
Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It's just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just because the computations don't have anything sentient in them. It's like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren't wet.
Steven Pinker
I'm so glad you're here, Anne,' said Miss Lavendar, nibbling at her candy. 'If you weren't I should be blue…very blue…almost navy blue. Dreams and make-believes are all very well in the daytime and the sunshine, but when dark and storm come they fail to satisfy. One wants real things then. But you don't know this…seventeen never knows it. At seventeen dreams do satisfy because you think the realities are waiting for you further on.
L.M. Montgomery
An artist has to take life as he finds it. Life by itself is formless wherever it is. Art must give it form.
Hugh MacLennan
I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.
Douglas Coupland
There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh. We yearned for the future How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
Margaret Atwood
Canadian nationalism was systematically encouraged and exploited by American capital. Canada moved from colony to nation to colony.
Harold A. Innis
A bully hides his fears with fake bravado. That is the opposite of self-assertiveness.
Nathaniel Branden
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
Michael Ondaatje
I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text. And I see that I am now using a long footnote to open a serious subject - shifting in a quick move to Paris, to a penthouse in the Hotel Crillon. Early June. Breakfast time. The host is my good friend Professor Ravelstein, Abe Ravelstein. My wife and I, also staying at the Crillon, have a room below, on the sixth floor. She is still asleep. The entire floor below ours (this is not absolutely relevant but somehow I can't avoid mentioning it) is occupied just now by Michael Jackson and his entourage. He performs nightly in some vast Parisian auditorium. Very soon his French fans will arrive and a crowd of faces will be turned upward, shouting in unison, 'Miekell Jack-sown'. A police barrier holds the fans back. Inside, from the sixth floor, when you look down the marble stairwell you see Michael's bodyguards. One of them is doing the crossword puzzle in the 'Paris Herald'.
Saul Bellow
As she peeked through the curtains with the phone in her hand, waiting for the police dispatcher to pick up, she realized there was one thing she did know about the naked stranger in her yard. He had, without a doubt, the finest butt on the planet.
Dani Harper
Passion creates, addiction consumes.
Gabor Maté
Life is a gift. Treat each moment with anticipation and gratitude.
Christopher Earle
Bicycles are the most efficient vehicles on the planet, 50 times more efficient than cars, and twice as efficient as walking.
Godo Stoyke
Angelica rolled the wedding band between her finger and thumb. "It's terrifying, to be on the verge of finally getting what you want.
Y.S. Lee
I think a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat born on the soil whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations with a stout wife and a half-dozen chickens is good quality.
Clifford Sifton
But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.
Saul Bellow
I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.
Rachel Hartman
Direct democracy is lazy anarchy, for people who don't want to be governed but are too lazy to govern themselves. They want participation served to them.
Heather Marsh
Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan
Anne Carson
… MOM!” Martha finally screamed. “Mom, you’ve got to see these!”“Is it about Hermione?” She exclaimed, rushing into the middle of the room. Her mouth dropped open in horror when she noticed Hermione’s walls.“I can’t find any… polite… photos of her, mom.”“Why are there ones of her eating out of dumpsters and giving seniors the finger?”“No idea,” Martha replied.“Oh god… I’ll get one out of my wallet,” Her mom decided, hurrying out of the room frantically. ...It’s funny how when one thing happens, it can make you forget about something else.
Rebecca McNutt
Too bad that miserable tribe died with their secrets.” Tossing the crystal across the table, she announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the kingdom of the gods is within our grasp.
Feather Stone
...careful the morning lest it wake from slumber the city half-encumbered by the morning mist ...
John Geddes
Sex is like a drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.
Margaret Atwood
I had this vision of the two of us holding hands or getting into some light petting behind shower curtains or up in the fencing aisle or some shit.
Susan Juby
To the young woman I say, This is the moment in your life when he who is wooing you will be at his kindest. And if you do not see kindness in the man you are dating, beware! For the partnership you are looking for will be nourished and nurtured only on the basis of a love that is not arrogant or prideful, but kind.
Ravi Zacharias
I never realized that there was history close at hand beside my very own home. I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles at the foot of our farm was history.
Stephen Leacock
for Pop, who sees the starsand Jude, who hears their music
Eleanor Catton
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
Margaret Atwood
At heart, we're all violent raging wolves, but in our actions we can be pacifists.
Polly Horvath
She's right, Kate's right, I'm right and you're wrong. If you drive her away from here it will be over my dead— chair, has it never occurred to you at on one occasion you might be consummately wrong?
William Gibson
Everything. Everywhere. Every moment. That is the scope of God's call on our lives, and that is the dignity our lives enjoy.
John G. Stackhouse Jr.
Blessed are the peacemakers? Billed are the warmongers, and then you shall have peace.
Stefan Molyneux
In life you get the choice, it depends on what you choose and how you live with the consequences to whether you win or lose!
Adam Johnston
He strode with the weight of robbed innocence and a stolen childhood, for a life time of pain and anger, of terror and death."- Frank Balenger
David Morrell
I keep staring at the bag in Mrs. Parks's hand: yellows, greens, blues, whites, pastel colors so soft they look as if they have faded in the sea. The washed colors of the sea and sleep. Pajama colors. The colors of baby clothes. In my nose is the smell of my brothers' heads after they are born. Maybe this is why people making journeys buy saltwater taffy. It gives you the lovely dreamy sense that you can start all over again from the beginning.
Polly Horvath
At night the fog was thick and full of light, and sometimes voices.
Erin Bow
What a magical place," she whispered in an awed voice. "I expect a unicorn or fairies to appear.""What would the fairies be doing?" Shermont asked. "Waltzing with the butterflies," she answered before thinking.
Laurie Brown
You can't teach a person to love something. But you can get him to feel the heat of your love for something.
James MacDonald
Even in the darkest and most cruel person, there is still a kernel of good. and within the most perfect champion, there is also darkness. The question is, will one give into the dark or the light?
Morgan Rhodes
All monsters are queers. Who is able to bring the dead back to life? God and the Devil. The Devil makes dead men into monsters: immortal, immoral—and queer.
Derek McCormack
I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy.
Yann Martel
... be radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness...
Ann Voskamp
So they're looking for a new face, with a voice to go along. I can tell you right now that ain't my style. I don't do no sing alongs, with my freedom.
Tegan Quin
Humans are unique in having the astonishing capacity to extend our sympathies far beyond the here and now. through time and space, to anywhere and anything we choose. It is our culture that decides how large and inclusive our moral circle is, but it is each of us who makes up our culture. (p.250)
Andrew Westoll
A leaf does not resist the breeze. A goose does not resist the urge to fly down south. Is this not happiness? Is this not freedom? To access this incredible state, we need only one thing: Trust. Trust that, when you are not holding yourself together so tightly, you will not fall apart. Trust that it is more important to fulfill your authentic desires than listen to your fears. Trust that your intuition is leading you somewhere. Trust that the flow of life contains you, is bigger than you, and will take care of you - if you let it.
Vironika Tugaleva
I don't think writers should write about answers. I think writers should write about questions.
Paul Haggis
You're pretty low maintenance, as women go.""I am, am I?" She sounded amused."Yeah. Like a cactus.
Roxanne Snopek
My method is based on female psychology, so it works regardless of your looks or money
Erik Von Markovik
There’s a long, uncomfortable silence in which I contemplate what might happen next. Maybe like the villain in a movie, this is where she gives me a long spiel about her hard-up life before she kills me. Not that I totally believe she’s nefarious. Real life isn’t made up of heroes and villains. Just ordinary people making choices they have to live with.
Kat Kruger
The world should have been in Technicolour, but seemed more like black and white.
Kenneth Oppel