Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 21

Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when they work within the rooted spot, the concrete habit, the particular reality of their town and family.
David Brooks
The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.
Keanu Reeves
The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature.
Saul Bellow
Jeeter?" Grace whispered into her walkie-talkie. "Are you awake?" She waited.A few weeks ago, she and Jeeter had started chatting on their walkie-talkies late at night when she couldn't sleep. He always answered her call no matter how late it was."I'm here," his voice echoed back. "Trouble sleeping again?""Yeah.""Another bad dream?""Uh-huh," she sniffed, unexpected tears flooding her eyes. My dad was calling for me, but I couldn't find him." She couldn't believe she'd said it. She'd never told anyone what she saw in her dreams. But Jeeter understood. He'd told her before that he had bad dreams too, since his mom had died.
Jo Ann Yhard
A partner to share the ups and downs with. Honor and strength, and knowing you're stronger together than apart
Donna Alward
you’re gone andyour unfinished poemlies alone on my desk—empty of tears,I only hope it rains today
John J. Geddes
I've done my best, and I begin to understand what is meant by 'the joy of strife'. Next to trying and winning, the best thing is trying and failing.
L.M. Montgomery
I wondered why I hadn't realized before that art was hard because you had to recreate not merely the scene but the way it soared into your soul and changed you.
Edeet Ravel
If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development.
Brian Tracy
At the end of this journey, it seems to me that reconciling the long shadows cast by the uneasy past may ultimately depend on elements so basic that they bring to mind a simple Slav proverb I once came across and never forgot: Eat bread and salt and speak the truth. They are the recovery of fact, public accountability and the instituting of fair trials of one sort or another, to help mark ends and beginnings and to return the moral compass as close to the centre as possible.
Erna Paris
How does one say in the jargon of musicology that my sould was pulled out of me and thrown up in the air, to be tossed about by the music. How does one say that I breathed, that I existed, in harmony with the ups and downs of those notes. What kind of notes both elevate and cast down, exalt and crush?
Yann Martel
He (Comings) has in the past performed successful energy-converting experiments, creating a ringing resonance by injecting certain frequencies into piezo-electric crystals. When the crystal was in resonance with the plenum of space, the power output rose significantly higher than the input. He concluded that, if allowed politically, such discoveries could guide humankind in building a completely clean energy infrastructure -- resonant technologies that allow us to live in harmony with the universal energy field and the Earth.
Jeane Manning
..., and sometimes there's just no point in arguing with him. "Yeah, okay 'me, Jeff, and Evan, sitting in a tree...'"Chris claps his hands triumphantly. "That's right, baby!" Than a more serious expression comes across his face. "But, in a tree? Really? I mean, im a not an expert on the gay sex thing, but I think the first time at least you should be on the ground..." And then the evening continues on as expected.
Kate Sherwood
Wealth can be created. Wit and intelligence can't.
Nicole Williams
I would not employ an author to referee a Ping-Pong match. By their very nature they are biased and bloody-minded. Better put a fox in a henhouse than to ask an author to judge his peers. (in a letter to the Governor General about the GA's Literary Awards & his issue--among others--with the judging system, 1981)
Jack McClelland
...the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.
Eckhart Tolle
Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships...
Margaret Atwood
If I spelled out the Principles of FaithI would be barking on the moon.
Leonard Cohen
When you see the truth for the first time, it is what people call a peak moment, or a moment of clarity. You get a larger percentage of what each moment of life actually contains; you are filled with life. Your mind is the gatekeeper of life, and sometimes it lets a little true life in, but most of the time it does not.Without the mind blocking life, you receive all of life, true life, and reflect it all back out.Seeing Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon for the first time is a peak moment for most people. Why does it make you feel so alive? Nothing really happens to you. Why doesn’t it feel as good the second time you see it? You are seeing the same thing. The reason is, your mind opens up when something is special.The truth is, every moment of life is special, and you can be completely open to life most of the time. You have to see the truth to see true life.
Michael Smith
We can’t make love out here. It’s freezing!” Maryanne cried.A boyishly beseeching look lit up his eyes. “We would heat up quickly.”“It’s fine for you,” she protested. “You only need one part of your body, and you’ll be sliding that into warmth.
Sharon Page
Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.
Cory Doctorow
Now the snow's coming down, and im watching it fall. Watching the people around, baby please come home. Pretty lights on a tree, and im watching you shine. You should be here with me! Baby please come home
Josh Ramsay of Marianas Trench
The more I thought about the reasons behind my insecurities, the more I realized that my issues with my appearance had nothing to do with reality. I didn’t feel fat because I was sluggish or unable to move my body with ease. I felt fat because I didn’t fit the mold of what society has taught me a woman should look like.
Jenn Sadai
This is what we do. We make tea and read books and watch people die.
Megan Crewe
people say things meant to rip you in half but you hold the power to notturn their words into a knifeand cut yourself
Rupi Kaur
Why should I mind?” She drummed her fingertips against his knee. “Because you got asked to play baseball, while I got a lecture on circumspection, Jezebels, and leading men into sin?” “Did you really?” He managed to sound annoyed, fascinated, and amused all at once.“It’s not funny.” “Of course it’s not.” He was quick to try and placate her. “But we can do something about those lectures real quick. All you have to do is marry me.”Coyote Bluff had too many secrets that weren’t hers to share. She couldn’t put him in that position. He was a federal marshal. And she’d seen what all the lies her father told had done to her mother. She’d died hating him.The last remnants of her earlier contentment vanished. “I like my independence.” “Then I guess you’ll have to get used to the lectures, Sheriff Jezebel,” he replied.
Paula Altenburg
you can accomplish more than you think you can. most of your limitations are in your mind.
Ernie J. Zelinski
Is there a word for adults when they aren't parents?"Steppa laughs. "Folks with other things to do?""Like what things?""Jobs, I guess. Friends. Trips. Hobbies.
Emma Donoghue
Emotions play a vital part in the social transmission of news and information. Interest, happiness, disgust, surprise, sadness, anger, fear and contempt affect how some stories catch on and travel far wider than others.
Alfred Hermida
People are kinder to the unborn than they are to the women themselves, and soon I had my ticket.
Emily Schultz
I could tell he was becoming sulky, as boys and men do when they're caught bluffing. And I ignored him, as girls and women do when they catch them out.
Alan Bradley
One's freedom is one's love and one's love is one's undoing, it's all in the dictionary...
Duncan McNaughton
I do not fear the nightWhen I know that todayI am bathed in a lightIt cannot be stolen away
Holly Ducarte
Eyes which feast on the beauty of the world will always look beautiful to others. That which receives beauty exudes it as well.
Vironika Tugaleva
When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent.
Mordecai Richler
A mind that trusts itself is light on its feet.
Nathaniel Branden
The self-addressed stamped envelope. The representation of everything that was wrong with the old publishing industry.
Alexei Maxim Russell
What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight.
Emily St. John Mandel
The sooner you make a mistake and learn to live with it, the better. You're not responsible for everything. You can't control the way things end up.
Courtney Summers
If you want a new life you need to hurry up and close the door on your old life.
Iva Ursano
Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic.
Ann-Marie MacDonald
Hope is a pleasant acquaintance but an unsafe friend.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton
Happiness isn’t something you work toward, the same way misery isn’t something you work toward.
Brent Jones
His thought processes imploded when she grabbed his ass, her nails digging in a way that set his body on fire. He loved the way her breath was hot on his cheek, the way her eyes had gone unfocused and fluttered closed, her lashes resting softly on her cheeks. She was here and for tonight, this weekend, she was his.
Leah Braemel
Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex
Margaret Atwood
I'm at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.
Alan Bradley
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.
Eckhart Tolle
…in the library…surrounded by things far more dangerous than what roamed the school corridors. For here thoughts were housed.
Louise Penny
This is my favorite part of the day. “Good morning, Class Two C,” I say. The entire class leaps up and sings out, “Good morning, miss!” Twenty-three faces are smiling at me. Sometimes they shout it with so much conviction that I laugh.
Jamie Zeppa
You'd have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn't seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, it's deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall.
Mary Lawson
Susie: Okay, Calvin. But you know what? You can't say, youcan'texpectanythingfrommeI'mbroken! And turn around the next minute and say, ohwoeismeeverybodytreatsmelikeI'mbroken! Which one is it? I can treat you the way I really feel, or I can treat you careful.Me: Real. Just be real.
Martine Leavitt
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
Saul Bellow
Authors - trust in your vision.
V.M. Sawh
A rural Venus, Selah rises from thegold foliage of the Sixhiboux River, sweepspetals of water from her skin. At once,clouds begin to sob for such beauty.Clothing drops like leaves."No one makes poetry,my Mme.Butterfly, my Carmen, in Whylah,”I whisper. She smiles: “We’ll shape it withour souls.”Desire illuminates the dark manuscriptof our skin with beetles and butterflies.After the lightning and rain has ceased,after the lightning and rain of lovemakinghas ceased, Selah will dive again into thesunflower-open river.
George Elliott Clarke
The real difference is that with fantasy—and by that I mean fantasy which can simultaneously tap into a cosmopolitan commonality at the same time as it springs from an individual and unique perspective. In this sort of fantasy, a mythic resonance lingers on—an harmonious vibration that builds in potency the longer one considers it, rather than fading away when the final page is read and the book is put away. Characters discovered in such writing are pulled from our own inner landscapes... and then set out upon the stories' various stages so that as we learn to understand them a little better, both the monsters and the angels, we come to understand ourselves a little better as well.
Charles de Lint
First her body goes missing, then her finger.
Bliss Addison
Life’s short when compared to eternity, but eternity is only worth it because of life.
Scott Thompson
Our listeners asked us:"What is chaos?"We're answering:"We do not comment on economic policy.
John Vaillant
they ask for water we give them seathey ask for bread we give them seathey ask for life we give them only the sea
M. NourbeSe Philip
The fulness of the Spirit is not a question of our getting more of the Holy Spirit, but rather of the Holy Spirit getting more of us.
Oswald J. Smith