Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 15

And if you couldn't be loved, the next best thing was to be let alone.
L.M. Montgomery
You never have to change anything you get up in the middle of the night to write.
Saul Bellow
I smiled into the darkness. There was nothing "just" about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again.
Rachel Hartman
Ideally, friends are people with whom we can be our true selves, with whom we can fearlessly let our guard down. (Arguably, a close friend is someone with whom we can allow ourselves to enter the daydreaming attentional mode, with whom we can switch in and out of our different modes of attention without feeling awkward.)
Daniel J. Levitin
What is more dramatic, even romantic, than the tumbled towers of lower Manhattan, rising suddenly to the clouds like a magic castle girdled by water? Its very touch of jumbled jaggedness, its towering-sided canyons, are its magnificence.
Jane Jacobs
...some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ...
John Geddes
...authority is the unmistakeable tone in the voice of a true writer...
John Geddes
Hans Selye, the pioneer in the understanding of human stress, was often asked the following question: "What is the most stressful condition a person can face?" His unexpected response: "Not having something to BELIEVE in.
Hans Selye
This isn’t a duality. I’m not one of the Balfour Academy soldiers, drinking a potion to become virile, ugly, and monstrously strong. There isn’t a lever inside me that determines which of me you’re talking to at once. A knife can cut or stab. The label doesn’t change. It’s still a knife.
Wildbow
When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.
Ruth Ozeki
I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.
Margaret Atwood
In the darkest of times, laughter helps revolutionize our perspective.
Phil Callaway
On that walk around the building, two sets of cops coming out stopped to tell our guys to hustle us inside so they could head back out on the road. Accidents everywhere. A pileup oneach of two major roads. “Welcome to winter,” one said. “When fifty percent of drivers should have their licenses temporarily suspended.
Kelley Armstrong
I was very much provoked. Of course, I knew there are no fairies; but that needn't prevent my thinking there is.
L.M. Montgomery
Don't let the urge to everyday, blindfold you to ultimately loose in life.
Faisal Khosa
If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.
Margaret Atwood
Time doesn’t really ‘march on’. It tends to tip-toe. There’s no parade. No stomping of boots to alert you to its passing. One day, you turn around and it is gone.
Heather Babcock
You got a choice, dude. We've all got choices. Lots of them. Every single second of the day we're making choices. You've just been making bad ones, is all.
Ruth Ozeki
At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.
Rachel Cusk
Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.
Michael Ondaatje
We’ll stand before the piles of stones that used to be weapons, and we’ll build an altar.
Sarah Bessey
To say that I wished I wasn't there would be a ludicrous understatement, but I'd only ever had the illusion of choice: We have to do this, Hank had said. It's for Ellis. To refuse would have been an act of calculated cruelty. And so, because of my husband's war with his father and their insane obsession with a mythical monster, we'd crossed the Atlantic at the very same time a real madman, a real monster, was attempting to take over the world for his own reasons of ego and pride.
Sara Gruen
Well?" he prompted, toying with the elastic of her leggings. "What should we do with these pants, Bailey?"One teasing stroke of his fingers over her belly, and a breath shuddered out of her lungs."Take them off," she choked out.
Elle Kennedy
Be savagely thankful, and continuously in awe of the power you possess. You are alive. Inside of an endless cosmos with the freedom that shines brightest in the dark.. Choices. Your choices belong to you so intimately, that they will never leave you. They, unlike the changing nature of love, where the failing machinery of our bodies will never abandon you to time. Good or bad, they will stay always. An antique that shows the future who you were and what you stood for. So know that what you choose to stand for, is what will inform you of what you've chosen to stand against, so stand. Let each foot crash land into what you believe, and plant them they're firmly so they may take root in your convictions. And stand.
Shane L. Koyczan
The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.
Ian Hacking
Someday," Joseph said to his granddaughter, "someday something will happen and you will want to go back to the carving. You won't be able to prevent yourself; that's just the way it is. The world always somehow takes us back to the chisel. Something happens and we have to respond.
Jane Urquhart
Dour music has its own beauty, for the song of ruin is most fertile.
Steven Erikson
This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids sand. One hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. the only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours.
Douglas Coupland
Recent studies have shown that approximately 40% of authors are manic depressive. The rest of us just drink.
Melodie Campbell
You had the physical bullies and the emotional bullies and they both revelled in destroying lives.No, she had no time for them. But there were others whose strength was of a much rarer kind. Not easy to find, because they revealed nothing. They were quiet. They often believed themselves to be much weaker than they were. But when pushed too hard, they surprised themselves, finding they would not back away another step, that a wall had risen in their souls, unyielding, a barrier that could not be passed. To find one such as this was the most precious of discoveries.
Steven Erikson
You look at me with them eyes of yers, an I look at yer lips... an all I can think about is what it'ud be like to kiss you.
Moira Young
In the morning she found pieces of a birdchopped and scattered by the fanblood sprayed onto the mosquito net,its body leaving paths on the wallslike red snails that drifted down in lumps.She could imagine the featherswhile she had sleptfalling around herlike slow rain.
Michael Ondaatje
Prototypes of inventions that use novel combinations of resonance, magnetism, states of matter, certain geometries or inward swirling motion to unlock the secrets of universal energy have already been built. They provide proof of new or rediscovered principles. In many variations of these inventions, a small input triggers a disproportionately large output of useable power.""These energy converters don't violate any laws of physics if they simply tap into a previously unrecognized source of power - background space. A flow of energy from that source can continue day and night, whether or not the sun shines or the wind blows.
Jeane Manning
Did people... really kiss like that? She had had NO idea. She had imagined being kissed, and in her imagination she had been swept away by the sheer romance of the meeting of lips. In her naivete she had not considered the possibility that a kiss, as a prelude to sexual activity, might have powerful effects on parts of her body, in fact, even parts she had been only half aware of possessing. She ached and throbbed in all sorts of unfamiliar places
Mary Balogh
When Fortune empties her chamberpot on your head smile and say 'We are going to have a summer shower.'
John A. Macdonald
Religion thrives on want and fear of the unknown, on lack of education. A frightened and confused human is fed by religious institutions with the illusion that the solution to his real problems is to appeal to the good will of an imaginary supernatural divinity religious institutions claim to represent. With one hand they offer a cup of rice and a pair of used shoes someone else has paid for. With the other, they place the Bible on the table, setting up the poor in spirit for the belief trap.
Paul Greene
Some days in the camp you prayed to live; some days you prayed to die quick. Some days you didn't bother praying, knowing there was no sense to anything.
Allan Dare Pearce
... but now men who could work preferred to beg, and the artists forgot that their calling was noble and became imitators instead of creators, charging exorbitant sums for the rubbish they churned out with one eye closed.
Pauline Gedge
My whole marriage to her, I finally realized, was a placeholder, leading me to this very day.
Barbara Avon
This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making, a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of our existence, from what kind of gelato to order to what career to pursue. Living is an inherently emotional business.
David Brooks
I try to keep the happy memories. If that's what you call selective memories, I'm good with that.
Nicole Williams
Between reaction and revolution there is nothing to choose. Neither leave the track, they just allow different people to drive while the same people are run over.
Heather Marsh
Whether this blood was daemon, human, or something else, it was still only blood, and blood was only the ink of life.
Gabrielle Harbowy
...but maybe it's just the genetic code of a teenager. If your parents forbid something, you have to want it.
Brynna Gabrielson
Ava turned to the side, staring out into the dark. In profile, her face was suddenly tired and sad, and Cole felt the urge to wrap himself around her. To protect her from whatever was dragging her down.
Danika Stone
Even water carves monuments of stone, so do our thoughts shape our character.
Hugh B. Brown
I don't know. I was just calling it that in my head all along, and so I programmed that name into the processor. What do you think?""It's stupid," Lourdvang rumbled.
Wesley King
When I was in junior high school, I used to think that Disney's 1990's paranormal television program 'So Weird' was every kid's ideal life - not going to school, living on a tour bus, having rockstar parents, traveling all over North America and never staying in one place for more than a week or so. Of course, eventually the realization hits you that the kids out there who really do live like this, pulling up stakes every week and never staying with their friends or having a permanent residence, aren't really happy.
Rebecca McNutt
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
How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?
Ruth Ozeki
The self-judging person will always judge others. The rubric we develop for ourselves, the measuring stick we put against our own mind and body, generalizes to every other human being.
Vironika Tugaleva
. . . Nietzche himself had a Christian view of history, seeing the present moment always as some crisis, some fall from classical greatness, some corruption or evil to be saved from.
Saul Bellow
A perfect example, in matters of life and death, of love and passion, of choice or destiny; options decrease to a singular course.
Bruce Crown
She wondered if all boys were like this, their meanness a self defense.
Omar El Akkad
you look at me and cryeverything hurtsi hold you and whisperbut everything can heal
Rupi Kaur
You know what would be fun,” our school’s administration likely thought, huffing glue out of an old sock. “What if we make our cruellest eleven-year-olds assess each other in wet spandex for an hour every day for a week in the dead of winter?
Scaachi Koul
… I don't know what to say.'‘That’s okay. Sometimes talking is like singing in a storm.’‘Like when you’re scared?’‘Exactly.’‘Or when you’re sad?’‘That too. A voice can be reassuring.
Élise Turcotte
Regrets serve their purpose. You'll see.
Lori Lansens
The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.
Yann Martel
That's the thing about war: it's never enough to disable the buildings, to blow holes into their middles; instead, they're hit over and over again, as if to pound them to dust, to disintegrate them, to remove them from the earth, to deny that families ever lived in them. But people did live there. And they needed to return, even though there was nothing left to return to except forbidding piles of broken concrete and cable wires sticking out of the heaps like markers of malevolence.
Izzeldin Abuelaish