Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 11

I see you kneeling in church—stained only by colored windows
John Geddes
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.
Margaret Atwood
We are like puzzle pieces who are perfectly suited to make a giant picture together, but we are assembling ourselves in the dark.
Vironika Tugaleva
What if you could just invent your family, your home, your life? You could. You could call Sunday Wednesday. Be awake and living at 3 a.m. Use T-shirts instead of sheets. Eat lettuce like an apple. Blow your nose on socks. Take four unrelated people and make a family.
Sarah Ellis
Winters are a desolate time where all senses are wiped away, and here in Canada, this is especially true. All smells are sucked clean from the air, leaving only a harsh, icy crispness. Colours are stripped away, leaving a stark white landscape, a sky which stays black at night and gray in the day, a world of only three shades. Stay outside too long, and your hands will get so cold that they’ll go numb and turn red, like the claws of a lobster. During a whiteout, even sight itself is reduced to nothingness.
Rebecca McNutt
And yet, for the fully modern being, not being able to tweet or otherwise " share" - feelings, opinions, thoughts, jokes, links to cat videos or pictures of dinner - for even an hour is akin to eternal exile in the desert, and hence in part the rising tide of juror-caused mistrials across the planet.
Christie Blatchford
My pa maintained that there are three important parts to a man. You got the heart, the brain, and the python.
Allan Dare Pearce
Everybody has. It wouldn't do for us to have all our dreams fulfilled. We would be as good as dead if we had nothing left to dream about.
L.M. Montgomery
Il faut suivre ta boussole [You must follow your compass], as we say in French. Do what feels right to you, then figure out how to earn a living at the same time.
Jeffrey Alford
Lift up your heads, ye people,lift up your faces, too,open your mouths to sing His praise,and the rain will fall on you.
Aimee Semple McPherson
He didn't ask "Where will you spend eternity?" as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, "With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?
Saul Bellow
Each and every prayer is a tiny piece of a great cosmic puzzle, which when fitted together will allow for the completion of the grand picture of the Almighty Lord's plan for humanity and the universe.
Jason Mandryk
I am a bed of sparks you breathe upon and kindle
John Geddes
If all you are doing is spending time with the struggling members of your church and you are not building proactively into your church's culture, and you are being shortsighted and limiting the effectiveness of your ministry.
James MacDonald
It might seem like the easier way to get rid of a poet would be just to take him out to the backyard, have him kneel between the cans with tomato plants in them and put a bullet in his brain. But they knew from history that it doesn't work to kill a writer. Every time you shoot a poet,a dozen new ones are born. It's like plucking a grey hair.
Heather O'Neill
When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?
Naomi Klein
This has suggested to some that the very structure of human thought is oppositional-that is to say, rational and associative, rather than linear and categorical.
Marcel Danesi
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.
Northrop Frye
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
Eric Berne
Long, I am woman who speaks but one language, the language of the fall--discontentment and self-condemnation, the critical eye and the never satisfied.
Ann Voskamp
Why is it," she asked, snuggling closer, "that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?
Mary Balogh
Here there was no monster greater than the ragged mountains.
Rachel Hartman
Where there is society, there is no need for charity.
Heather Marsh
...what will happen to us this night will resemble a flame consuming the icy desert, a shower of stars reflected in a piece of a mirror that in the darkness suddenly fell out of its frame to warn its owner about the proximity of death. It'll resemble the shepherd's pipe and the music that has not been written yet.
Sasha Sokolov
What does she even eat, do you think?""Tea fungus,"Ruth says. "Unsweetened. From an eye dropper. Is what I picture. either that or some sort of sea vegetable.""Sad," I say."It is," Ruth muses.We decide to order two skim milk cappuccinos and split a gluten-free carrot cake cupcake.
Mona Awad
In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast of mind had some of its origin in our pit, which had much the character of a Protestant Hell. I was probably the most entranced listener to a sermon the Reverend Andrew Bowyer preached about Gehenna, the hateful valley outside the walls of Jerusalem, where outcasts lived, and where their flickering fires, seen from the city walls, may have given rise to the idea of a hell of perpetual burning. He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason then why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.
Robertson Davies
Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic 'rights,' [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude: Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our urban schools terrorist training camps, our legislatures brothels where rights are sold to the highest electoral bidder.
D A Carson
You fellows are amazing,' the sweaty cook roared over the stoves. 'Everything happens to you only. Each time you come here, you have a new adventure story to entertain us
Rohinton Mistry
We understand more than we know.
Margaret Atwood
Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.
Saul Bellow
Lies don't make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.
Stefan Molyneux
He leaned in and kissed her. The world didn’t stop dead on its axis. Nothing fell from the sky. It was a gentle meeting of flesh, not a melding of souls. Yet the taste of her lips was everything he remembered, and more. Without moving a muscle—without batting an eyelash—she managed to take ten years of simmering frustration and dissolve them as if they were nothing more than a spoonful of sugar in a pot of hot water.He straightened. A series of expressions tripped across her face in rapid succession. He caught shellshock, bemusement, and then a faint trace of…sadness.Definitely not one-sided. But not what he’d been looking for, either.
Paula Altenburg
Moral deliberation has to be somewhere in the brain, after all. It’s not going to be in the foot or the stomach, and it’s certainly not going to reside in some mysterious immaterial realm. So who cares about precisely where?
Paul Bloom
All of this,' the prophet said, serene, 'all of our activities, Sayid, you must understand this, all of your suffering, it's all part of a greater plan.''You'd be surprised at how little comfort I take from that notion.
Emily St. John Mandel
What we do not confront, we inhabit.What we do not reject, we accept.What we do not fight, we become.
Stefan Molyneux
Just beyond the ticket booth Father had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain. There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the curtain that we had to replace it regularly. Behind it was a mirror.
Yann Martel
Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.
Saul Bellow
your moods and colors are my climate, not the changing face of the sky
John Geddes
This is about me being ready to succeed.When I win in my mind, I truly win.Anything worthwhile deserves some time.I will do it this time! No excuses!
Lorii Myers
Must have been some kind a nightmare.”“Yeah,” I answer, my usual calm, vacant voice returning. “Can’t wait to wake up.
K.A. Tucker
There is nothing like the moment you connect with a reader! Nothing like the response that you get when what you have written touches someone in some way. It's a moment in which your work is almost a co-creation, you and the reader joining forces to make your words live.
Dani Harper
But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead that I only half believed in her. I wanted, I needed her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy like volcanic eruptions. I know. And the sick must husband their resources even as they are resourceful for their husbands. But I couldn't help wanting for her, couldn't help the feeling that she'd given in, that she had measured out with coffee spoons what it was that she might ask of life and having found it lacking, tragically, gapingly lacking, had decided none-the-less to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life.
Claire Messud
the mind is a neural computer
Steven Pinker
See my blog at crossedeyesanddottedtees.wordpress.com for more of my writing.
Ellie Presner
Those who doubt themselves will doubt you. Those who limit themselves will try to limit you. Do not fight them. Smile, go your own way, and trust that your example is enough.
Vironika Tugaleva
When you take the time to look at the real relationship between faith and science, you find the two are not enemies; rather, they are friends. Granted, they are friends that do not always agree on everything. No friendship ever does. They have their points of tension. Every friendship has these as well. As friends, faith and science have a great deal of history together. They work hard to hold each other accountable and challenge one another to be better (I hope you have friends like that too).
Jon Morrison
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
Margaret Atwood
Isn’t that a view worth looking at? Nice and far from the marketplace, ain’t it? No buying and selling and getting gain. You don’t have to pay anything- all that sea and sky free- 'without money and without price.
L.M. Montgomery
It had taken skill, tact, an ability to choose friends well, and a great deal of luck... Luck was always part of it, one way or another
Guy Gavriel Kay
Kelley. Your name is Kelley, isn't it?" He didn't wait for her confirmation. "Yes. Well. Tell me...that bit just now...was that from Dante's Inferno?"Uh...no," Kelley stammered. Her face felt hot.Really?"I'm in for it.Are you sure?" he continued. "Because it most certainly wasn't from this play. And it bloody well sounded like hell.
Lesley Livingston
As she began to speak she stood and started to wrap herself, expertly, creating a binding in minutes that held without a wrinkle until the show ended. Peggy made a connection between binding her breasts and wrapping her hands in boxing wraps; this was what one did before battle, to protect one's self (and it is the Self, absolutely, that binding protects for many butches).
S. Bear Bergman
Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.There's no one alivewho can say if he will be tomorrow.Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery.No one can teach it, no one can grasp it.Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink!You can let the rest go. Am I making sense?I think so. How about a drink.Put on a garland. I'm surethe happy splash of wine will cure your mood.We're all mortal you know. Think mortal.Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,
Anne Carson
...when I chose you, I didn't want the commonplace - I didn't want a 'partner' - I wanted a shrine...
John Geddes
You can stretch to your fullest in this land, Emma, and not touch any edges. There's no dream too big for the wilderness. I'd hate to see it tamed and carved up into little fiefdoms.
Alice Valdal
It’s not enough to fill your head with wondrous ideas—you must initiate action.
Lorii Myers
The more deeply we dive, the less we mind upsetting waves, finding within intimate relationship an increasingly compelling invitation to seek and find freedom through our shared heart, our shared body, our shared limitations, our shared boundlessness, our shared mortality, our shared yes, our shared being, our shared all...P.14
Robert Augustus Masters
In philosophy an individual is becoming himself.
Bernard Lonergan
He read vividly.
David Brooks
Who needs toothpaste when you have cigarettes?
kevin mcpherson eckhoff
I can't stop.
Shane L. Koyczan