Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 23

you are the mysterious fire at my finger tips
John Geddes
Do I really smother my own joy because I believe that anger achieves more than love?
Ann Voskamp
All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.
Margaret Atwood
It's not that gays and diversity equal high technology. But if your culture is not such that it can accept difference, and uniqueness and oddity and eccentricity, you will not get high tech industry.
Richard Florida
[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.
Malcolm Gladwell
I’ve just been transferred to Kanglung,” I say. They look at me to see if I am joking, and then they look at each other. There is a long, terrible silence and we all look at the floor. Karma Dorji wipes his runny nose on his sleeve and looks up. “Oh, miss,” he says sadly. “Please don’t go.”“Just a minute,” I say, and go into the bathroom. I latch the door and turn on the tap full force. When the water is running noisily, I lean my hot forehead against the damp, flaking concrete, and cry.
Jamie Zeppa
Just because the ones we love die (or fall out of our lives or disappear from the spinning of our spheres) does not mean we love them any less or erase them from the deeply etched lines of the maps we have traveled.We find ways to keep them alive in spirit, with the brutal knowing that they are gone in body.We can remember; we can feel & this can all be grief & it can all be love, too.
Bryonie Wise
Achieving the state of SABLE is not, as many people who live with these knitters believe, a reason to stop buying yarn, but for the knitter it is an indication to write a will, bequeathing the stash to an appropriate heir.
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
It is often better to have a great deal of harm happen to one than a little a great deal may rouse you to remove what a little will only accustom you to endure.
Grenville Kleiser
If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.
Anne Michaels
Love does not last forever, then?""He asked me the same thing this morning," she said. "No, it does not - not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But it does die and cannot be revived.
Mary Balogh
When we can see our own self, angry and hurting others, within every villain, then we can love. When we can see our own desperate struggle for belonging in the eyes of every enemy, then we can love. When we can look at the greatest of atrocities and see the opportunity for healing within, then, and only then, can we really love.
Vironika Tugaleva
Trust your fears. When a quiet voice whispers, "you are being used", listen. Ignore your baser desires.
Michael R. Fletcher
Jimmy Murray, you are an ass,' said Aunt Ruth, angrily.'Well, we're cousins,' agreed Cousin Jimmy pleasantly.
L.M. Montgomery
For the first time in this 11 years--I have come to love the darkness--for I believe now that it is a part, a very, very small part of Jesus' dakness and pain on earth. You have taught me to accept it [as] a "spiritual side of 'your work'"... (Mother Teresa, quoated in Kolodiejchuk, p. 208).
Brian Kolodiejchuk
In your diary, you quoted old Jiko saying something about not-knowing, how not-knowing is the most intimate way, or did I just dream that?Anyway, I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think maybe it's true, even though I don't really like uncertainty. I'd much rather 'know', but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.
Ruth Ozeki
Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.
Anne Michaels
When we suffer in silence, we think that we are alone, different, separate. When we share our stories of suffering, we find that we are the same.
Vironika Tugaleva
To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.
Ruth Ozeki
Ignorance and prejudice and fear go hand in hand
Neil Peart
Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run...
Margaret Atwood
I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it...I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.
Yann Martel
Even now, it's still hard for him to say it. I don't blame him. It's an icky word. Why couldn't whoever was in charge of naming things call cancer 'sugar' and sugar, 'cancer'? People might not eat so much of the stuff then. And it's so much more pleasant to die of sugar.
Sarah Wylie
She tells me about dreams. She says my dreams are helium and balloons, and I've made the mistake of letting go a few to many times, but I still got this one. Tied around my finger like a wedding ring because even though I don't believe in marriages, I'm gonna bring this one home.
Shane L. Koyczan
Most people think the biggest sacrifice, the greates act of love you can give is to die for someone. And probably it is. But Sometimes it is the opposite. The biggest thing you can do for someone is to live.
Sarah Wylie
...you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought...
John Geddes
There are times when our victories have a cost that we did not foresee, when winning brings us loss.
Susanna Kearsley
Somehow it felt familiar, an old story retold, the claws in my shoulder, my arms twisted behind my back, the drag down the street, Will assisting my father and thinking how much fun it was to hunt someone down. I knew it all. Each snarled command was a line from an old but faithless song. “Pipe down! I’m not going to hurt you! I just want to talk to you! This is for your own good!
Kaimana Wolff
When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
Margaret Atwood
Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.
Mary Balogh
You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
Yann Martel
No one knows who they are more than someone who changes their identity (before I became a farmer, I was a leadership coach).
M.C. Humphreys
Claire, did I invite you to my barbeque?" Massie asked, her neck tilting to the right and her arms tightly crossed."Huh? No. I mean, I don't know," Claire said." Massie said through her teeth.
Lisi Harrison
Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile.
Spider Robinson
...at some point we must achieve our identity -we can't be always in adolescence seeking who we are...
John Geddes
The reflex of fear was soon replaced with another, more useful emotion.Rage.
Tara Moss
We shall be Canadians first foremost and always and our policies will be decided in Canada and not dictated by any other country.
John G. Diefenbaker
There is nothing like discovering your own secrets in someone else’s story. Those thoughts and feelings you believed were too ugly or strange or idealistic or desperate or whimsical or hungry or sad they had to be just you because there could be no other place for them, anywhere. Books that make you realize you’re not alone, you never were. Those are the ones I like best.
Courtney Summers
For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.
Northrop Frye
Why is it they say you always hurt the ones you love? Because you know exactly how to do it.
Eileen Cook
I am not a hero in soul and never will be, but I am better than I was. Or so I tell myself; and for now, that is enough.
Andrew Davidson
She pressed his amulet to her lips, then let it fall on its chain to rest between their two bodies. “We could leave here,” she said to him. “We could run away together.”He frowned at the stars, the bubble of peacefulness that had settled around them after their lovemaking now ruptured. “I run from nothing and no one.
Paula Altenburg
Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?
Mary Balogh
That's how you have to read this book, you see. You wade through a few sentences, then stop and think about them, then wade through a few more.
Susanna Kearsley
your artis not about how many peoplelike your workyour art is aboutif your heart likes your workif your soul likes your workit's about how honestyou are with yourselfand you must never trade honesty for relatability
Rupi Kaur
Knowing about God is crucially important for the living of our lives. As it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesmen to fly him to London, put him down without explanation in Trafalgar Square and leave him, as one who knew nothing of English or England, to fend for himself, so we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it .The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfold, as it were , with no sense of direction, and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.
J.I. Packer
Most people, including Ma, preferred to brush unpleasantness away, as if, by sweeping it outside with the dust, it could be forgotten. As if, by acknowledging the existence of something unsavory in their community, they might be tainted by it themselves.
Shilpi Somaya Gowda
I've no plans to couple with anyone other than my new bride for the next century or so, and it feels as though it's takin' a century to get to it!
Leigh Ann Edwards
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
Wayne Gretzky
Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.
Adam Gopnik
Flowing from this union, source of a plenitude of joy, the love of the couple reveals itself through the daily acceptance of the limits and faults of each other and in mutual openness. It is this acceptance in and through gentleness, kindness, forgiveness, confidence and the desire to see shining in the other the warm light of the Spirit of God that becomes the great sign of the merciful love of God for man and His incessant forgiveness.
Jean Vanier
According to accepted newspaper clichés, we all go down fighting. The other day I even read that an 18-month-old baby had died after a long battle with cancer. That has become the mandatory phrase for all who expire, disease-ridden. They battled valiantly; they lost. When I finally depart I hope somebody will write, instead, that I died after a long battle with life.
Pierre Berton
[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
Adam Gopnik
Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing.
Mary Balogh
vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime. They almost always involve throwing yourself into a historical process. They involve compensating for the brevity of life by finding membership in a historic commitment.
David Brooks
Indifference may not wreck a man's life at any one turn but it will destroy him with a kind of dry-rot in the long run.
Bliss Carman
Worth is not something you can buy for $39.99, nor something you can lose with 10 extra pounds. Self-judging people make good consumers. Start a revolution. Love yourself.
Vironika Tugaleva
How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.
Michael Ondaatje
When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.
Steven Pinker
It's not always about fixing what is broken. Sometimes it's about starting over and creating something new.
Iva Ursano