Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 26

There's more to life than just surviving . . . but . . . sometimes just surviving is all you get
Charles de Lint
Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder
Rohinton Mistry
perhaps, all these years, historians had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral because a spiral was so difficult to describe. was war, then, the big solution after all? war the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenalin, the solvent of ennui, angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? war itself a massive sexual act. -war, finally, the controller, the trimmer & excisor; the justifier of fertility?" --the Wanting Seed/Burgess
Tony Burgess
Don't live your life like a movie. Always thinkin you could've been something. Don't live your life for me or for anyone. You live your life as if you're one.
Tegan Quin
Let failure be your workshop. See it for what is is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition. (from Workbook)
Steven Heighton
I'm not going to have a husband anyway," said Laura. "I'm going to live by myself in the garage.
Margaret Atwood
I hate France. It's like the whole country's on a diet
Gordon Korman
People do not just buy products. They buy better versions of themselves. And the packages in which they want the products to be delivered must come from humble and approachable brands. People have no patience for fluff.
Cendrine Marrouat
Women, in general, will find it difficult to turn from a man and stop demanding that he meets their needs, provides security, and protects their identity, and return to me. Men, in general, find it very hard to turn from the works of their hands, their own quests for power and security and significance, and turn to me.
William Paul Young
War is food and drink and disease and patience and anger and hate and cold and stealth and terror as well as sweet silver and bitter iron and the glitter of arms in the sun or under the moon.
Miles Cameron
Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.
Margaret Atwood
Then Treece realized a remarkable thing. He understood in a flash that everyone in the world was the same age -no one younger or older than anyone else. He could not understand it, but he knew it to be true. Was there something in the air of the world that made people appear to be old or middle-aged or young?
P.K. Page
...my dreams are tangled in images of stars and clouds and firelight - we go camping at night - it's my lucid dream of being with you...
John Geddes
My life will be what I make it," he told her. "That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make.
Mary Balogh
You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.
Laurence J. Peter
With stillness comes the benediction of Peace.
Eckhart Tolle
... only a seer or a lover would know that I'm making a jewelry of words for you -drawn from your essence -to flash and burn with your fire -so you can bedazzle with your own light ...
John Geddes
We have created youth ministry that confuses extroversion with faithfulness. We have effectively communicated to young people that sincerely following Jesus is synonymous with being 'fired up' for Jesus, with being excited for Jesus, as if discipleship were synonymous with fostering an exuberant, perky, cheerful, hurray-for-Jesus disposition like what we might find in the glee club or at a pep rally.
James K.A. Smith
Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry.
Yann Martel
In Chinese the word for crisis is weiji composed of the character wei which means danger and ji which means opportunity.
Jan Wong
Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment--that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.
Douglas Coupland
Sure, it may be one step forward and two steps back, but after a time with Parkinson's, I've learned that what is important is making that step count; always looking up.
Michael J. Fox
No one has the right to hear the gospel twice, while there remains someone who has not heard it once.
Oswald J. Smith
If only my genitals didn't floatWhen I relaxed in the bathAnd we both looked down and we both agreedIt's stupid to be a man
Leonard Cohen
Love is as much a question of the will as it is of the emotion. And if you will to love somebody, you can. - Ravi Zacharias' brother
Ravi Zacharias
But the remembering is imperfect; the instructions for which neurons need to be gathered and how exactly they need to fire are weak and degraded, leading to a representation that is only a dim and often inaccurate copy of the real experience. Memory is fiction. It may present itself to us as fact, but it is highly susceptible to distortion. Memory is not just replaying, but a rewriting.
Daniel J. Levitin
The world is larger and more beautiful than my little struggle.
Ravi Zacharias
The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call “self-help.
Steven Pinker
Spending too much time in one's individual silo can produce pride, isolation, and a stagnated ministry.
James MacDonald
The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.
Steven Pinker
Many so-called disorders of the mind are simply disorders of thought.
Vironika Tugaleva
Every choice is a renunciation. Indeed. Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one's back on many others.
Ronald Rolheiser
In everything you encounter in life you have a choice. Even if that choice is just in how you will react and move forward. The moment you become cognizant of your choices is the moment in which you also realize your own power. Choices equal power. You have the power to make things better for yourself. Even if it is just your mindset, which is actually a lot. Your perspective, your take on things, dictates your experience. Your quality of life is contingent on how you see things. Realizing that, is where the real power lies. You can make something from anything.
Akiroq Brost
Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness.
Jean Vanier
¨Kayla replied, ´And we---or the p-zeds, at any rate---copy indiscriminately, without reflection. And if the person they´re coyping is a psychopath, then their behavior ends up being de facto psychopathic, too.´ ¨
Robert J. Sawyer
REBECCA:If you sit long enough, maybe everything becomes clear. Maybe you can make sense of all the losses and find one thing you can hold on to. I'm sitting here thinking of everything that has passed, everyone that is gone, and hoping I can find her, my mother. Not because she is my first choice, but because she is my last choice and... my world has gone to shit.
Marie Clements
Each of us is the best we can be when we are fully present, focused yet relaxed, curious yet non-judgmental, committed yet flexible.
John Kuypers
Peace is not the absence of war—peace is the absence of fear.
Ursula Franklin
She leans over Roop the way Sardarji leaned over Satya the years she cried for children, brushing tears from Roop's heavy lashes with her lips. She strokes her head as a mother would, says. "Slpee little one, we are together now."And Roop sleeps, overcome by the afternoon heat.While Satya watches her.So trusting, so very stupid.
Shauna Singh Baldwin
Dont talk to the crazy kids. I longed to shout back that we weren't crazy. I'd mistaken her kid for a ghost, that's all.
Kelley Armstrong
You can't kick me down, I'm already on the ground. No, you can't, but you couldn't catch me anyhow.Blue skies, but the sun isn't comming out, no. Today, it is like I'm under a heavy cloud."Avril Lavigne (Runaway)
Avril Lavigne
Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity.
Robert Charles Wilson
My method is based on female psychology, so it works regardless of your looks or money
Erik Von Markovik
The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.
Pierre Trudeau
Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.
Steven Pinker
Camba had bent her long neck down to Ingar's level and was muttering in his ear. "Do you feel the breeze on your face?" I heard her say. "That's yours, and worth feeling. Look at those orange clouds. All the trials of a day may be endured if you know there's such a sky at the end of it. Some days I told my heart to wait, just wait, because the sunset would teach me again that my pain was nothing compared with the eternal, circling sky.
Rachel Hartman
Happiness is a series of grains of sand spread out in a desert of violence and anguish.
Sebastien de Castell
...don't be self-conscious - other people are completely unaware of you and more concerned with how they appear ...
John Geddes
Don't deny the past. Remember everything. If you're bitter, be bitter. Cry it out! Scream! Denial is gangrene.
Joy Kogawa
Never say that anything is hopeless, Tristal, until it has irreparably failed. And always remember that Elamm’ may perform any action, though it may seem impossible to you.
Benita J. Prins
I suppose all this sounds very crazy — all these terrible emotions always do sound foolish when we put them into our inadequate words. They are not meant to be spoken — only felt and endured.
L.M. Montgomery
Oh, we had a lot of sex back then in Montreal; it wasn’t just me. Blame it on the cold. The roses in everyone’s cheeks made them seem way more appealing than they actually were. We confused the indoors with intimacy and electric heating with connection.
Heather O'Neill
There's something special about her. When she helped me with her touch-""Exactly what was she touching that was so memorable for you?""Watch your mouth.
Michelle Rowen
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
Margaret Atwood
By nice women . . . you probably mean selfish women who have no more thought for the underprivileged overworked women than a pussycat in a sunny window for the starving kitten in the street. Now in that sense I am not a nice woman for I do care.
Nellie McClung
Am I crazy?" she asked. "I feel like I am sometimes." "Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But don't worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing not a bad thing.
Ruth Ozeki
Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.
Saul Bellow
People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity.
Douglas Coupland
In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony.
Mordecai Richler
...yes I understand your spells—your sex magic—at least, I know this: all lights dim when you walk in...
John Geddes