Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 27

He does have surprising, secret purposes. I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It’s hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts: “His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB).
Ann Voskamp
There were things I'd never do again, but then, they'd always seemed right.
Celine Dion
Putting his head down on the dog's neck, he vowed to himself fervently that he would always have some money on hand, no matter what became of him, so that he would be able to protect all that was truly valuable from the practical people in the world.
Morley Callaghan
...don't settle for pap - our thoughts wander through eternity - experience the wonder of being alive...
John Geddes
No one has the right to place one human being in a position of political power over another.
Wendy McElroy
Holding the space for yourself: Embrace the here and now. Embrace the journey. Try not to judge yourself but rather try to accept yourself as you are. Success is measured in staying on the path, not in how many successes or failures you've had along the way. Let gratitude fill your heart, live with love, laugh and enjoy the journey. All of life is a journey.
Akiroq Brost
So much anger in here. So much hate. So much to take out on someone. This time it's going to count. She's adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land. She's alone. She has nothing to eat. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. She's alive; that alone gives her the upper hand.
Peter Watts
Back when I was a devout Pharisee, I scowled at those who talked about grace, assuming they wanted both salvation and permission to do whatever they pleased. And when I came to discover grace as a biblical concept, it frightened me at first. The old idea of being saved by works has its benefits. It's a system where God owes you. You've been helping him out with all your good deeds. He can't very well put you through difficulty, since you're a taxpayer. You've paid your dues, you have your rights. But the beyond-belief teaching of grace is that we get what we can never pay for and more, including joy and hope and the desire to please him. I like living by God's grace a lot better than relying on my own efforts.
Phil Callaway
The best change you can make is to hold up a mirror so that people can look into it and change themselves. That's the only way a person can be changed."By looking into yourself," Zia said. "Even if you have to look into a mirror that's outside yourself to do it.""And you know," Maida added. "That mirror can be a story you hear, or just someone else's eyes. Anything that reflects back so you can see yourself in it.
Charles de Lint
I'm not trying to bleed you. I want to renew you.
W.P. Kinsella
...the secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ...
John Geddes
Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around.
Ruth Ozeki
Why do bad things happen to good people?''Because it makes a good story.
Andrew Kaufman
I've never really learned how to do this. When we hunted, we had people to take care of what we caught.""I thought you hunted with birds.""We did.""So the birds caught the animals, other people cleaned them... When you say 'hunting,' do you really mean 'going for a walk'?
Kate Sherwood
Nothing in life is fair except a witnessed duel.
Lynda Williams
If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert
Peter Watts
Wasted strokes, like missed deadlines, are preventable and costly.
Lorii Myers
Just because a relationship ends, it doesn't mean it's not worth having.
Sarah Mlynowski
(A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.
David Brooks
The perfection is the journey and the journey is one of learning
Akiroq Brost
The RemoteI often think about youwhen I’m lying alone inmy room with my mouthopen and the remotelost somewhere in the bed.
Leonard Cohen
This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
Margaret Atwood
The cliché comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it.
David duChemin
Since well before the Kung's engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not a language like Russian or Chinese but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the tiger speaks it, and so do the men--some more fluently than others.
John Vaillant
Happily chatting and counting pocket change, patting each other on the back and whistling foolish songs, we go out on the thousand-legged street and miraculously turn into passersby.
Sasha Sokolov
People are weary of politicians who make promises they are either unwilling or unable to keep. Society longs for statesmen but it gets politicians. Statesmen are leaders who uphold what is right regardless of the popularity of the position. Statesmen speak out to achieve good for their people, not to win votes. Statesmen promote the general good rather than regional or personal self-interest.
Henry T. Blackaby
I read somewhere once that souls were like flowers,' said Priscilla.'Then your soul is a golden narcissus,' said Anne, 'and Diana's is like a red, red rose. Jane's is an apple blossom, pink and wholesome and sweet.''And our own is a white violet, with purple streaks in its heart,' finished Priscilla.
L.M. Montgomery
Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps . . . perhaps . . . love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.
L.M. Montgomery
While the United States is becoming the most culturally diverse nation in the world, less than 5.5% of Christian congregations are multiethnic.
James MacDonald
So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn’t about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)
Nalo Hopkinson
When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more.
Heather O'Neill
Moira had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose. She was now a loose woman.I think we found this frightening.
Margaret Atwood
Sauve qui peut. To survivewe’d all turn thiefand rascal, or so says the fox,with her coat of an elegant scoundrel,her white knife of a smile,who knows just where she’s going:to steal somethingthat doesn’t belong to her -some chicken, or one more chance,or other life.
Margaret Atwood
Science and psychology have isolated the one prime cause for success or failure in life. It is the hidden self-image you have of yourself.
Bob Proctor
I hate my body Hate what it remembers. Hate what it let him do.
Cheryl Rainfield
Fearful that they would be caught, the young lovers cast themselves into the sea with their stone, saying these words, "May we ever be united in love and hidden as long as this stone hides in deep waters.
Rebecca Boucher
Every worldview has to bring together reason and faith.
Ravi Zacharias
Just because a relationship ends, does not mean it's not worth having.
Sara Mlynowski
But colonization had a nasty tendency to work its way into the DNA, the beliefs and philosophies and the very ways of life of the people being colonized.
Drew Hayden Taylor
We ultimately don't get what we want, we get what we are.
Robin S. Sharma
What matters most right now, is what you do next.
Akiroq Brost
What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull. But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be.
Margaret Atwood
Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the “work” will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of criminals commit 80 percent of crimes. Twenty percent of motorists cause 80 percent of all accidents. Twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80 percent of all beer. When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.
Malcolm Gladwell
What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will.
Paulette Jiles
As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.
Jane Jacobs
People imprison themselves.
Bruce Crown
He pulls down one of my straps, slides his other hand in among the feathers, but it's no good, I lie there like a dead bird. He is not a monster, I think. I can't afford pride or aversion, there are all kinds of things that have to be discarded, under the circumstances. "Maybe I should turn the lights out," says the Commander, dismayed and no doubt disappointed. I see him for a moment before he does this. Without his uniform he looks smaller, older, like something being dried. The trouble is that I can't be, with him, any different from the way I usually am with him. Usually I'm inert. Surely there must be something here for us, other than this futility and bathos.
Margaret Atwood
Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate people may seek them out. Misanthropes often practice psychiatry. The shy become performers. Natural thieves look for positions of trust. The frightened make bold moves.
Saul Bellow
Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn’t exist at all: awareness. Nothing more than that. Just awareness—a vague, ethereal sense of being. Being . . . but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future—only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception . . .
Robert J. Sawyer
In talking with people that have experienced it, I learned that PTSD is something that a person in a position of authority sometimes thinks they’re not supposed to have. They don’t always have an avenue to personally address it or even discuss it.
Stana Katic
If you ate nails, your stomach would hurt, and it’s a good thing that it would. Eating nails is deadly, thus the pain is helpful. Like this, sadness, anger, and anxiety are not to be feared or shamed, but listened to and decoded.
Vironika Tugaleva
What's the matter with you, Penny? You're not as good looking as you generally believe you are.
L.M. Montgomery
If you want a better answer, krasivyy, ask a better question. - Koldan Vasin
Bethany-Kris
...futility is being sorry while doing nothing to remove the cause ...
John Geddes
The Seduction Factor was a very hot and romantic series.”— Colorado Cowgirl
Scarlett Avery
If I'd defined success very narrowly, limiting it to peak, high-visibility experiences, I would have felt very unsuccessful and unhappy during those years. Life is just a lot better if you feel you're having 10 wins a day rather than a win every 10 years or so.
Chris Hadfield
The city takes a breath on Sunday. Of all that’s lost with the pursuit of what’s next, I hope we don’t lose that…
Hawksley Workman
The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious.
Cordelia Fine
The life of a vampire begins with the first bite.
A.J. Gallant
But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.
Margaret Atwood