Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 12

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 saw my first angel.And it was you.
Tegan Quin
An angel kissed my strings, while I slept last night. And her rhythm broke my hunger. And I died a little less.
Sara Quin
The only way Father is going to be upset in this case, is with the way the two of you are behaving toward one another. We are family, whether you believe it or not. Your lack of faith in Lucifer is what will do the damage in the long run. It has nothing at all to do with the time I spend with him.
Melyssa Winchester
God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?
Margaret Atwood
Our character isn’t defined by the battles we win or lose, but by the battles we dare to fight.
Robert Beatty
​Now I'm awake to the world. I was asleep before. That's how we let it happen. When they slaughtered Congress, we didn't wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the constitution, we didn't wake up then, either. Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.
Margaret Atwood
We ultimately don't get what we want, we get what we are.
Robin S. Sharma
Please be my friend.
kevin mcpherson eckhoff
Unless and until we rest in God, we will never risk for God.
Mark Buchanan
Our story may have any number of endings, but it begins with a singular choice we make today
Faisal Khosa
Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to be true. You can really understand something when you know what it is not.
Steven Pinker
A man cannot understand hunger, until he has swum in the depths of hunger
David Rea
While he has not, in my hearing, spoken the English language, he makes it perfectly plain that he understands it. And he uses his ears, tail, eyebrows, various rumbles and grunts, the slant of his great cold nose or a succession of heartrending sighs to get his meaning across.
Jean Little
I don't believe Old Nick can be so very ugly,' said Aunt Jamesina reflectively. 'He wouldn't do so much harm if he was. I always think of him as a rather handsome gentleman.
L.M. Montgomery
one day Satan himself visits, along with his great-grandmother—who is, not surprisingly, a total fucking bitch.
David Rakoff
Satan prowls but he’s a lion on a leash
Ann Voskamp
What a surprise. That boy doesn't have the sense God gave a cactus.
Kathleen Peacock
She could think of no other reason for this boy to continue to visit her if not to use her in some way.
Morgan Rhodes
Boys torment each other when there’s nothing else to do and no Frenchmen to fight.
Christian Cameron
She wondered if all boys were like this, their meanness a self defense.
Omar El Akkad
I was told very sternly at the hospital to avoid boys at all costs. Mess up your levels.""Oh, they do that!" Amy laughs. "Probably best to leave them alone for a while. The secret, though, is to start with one you're not that bothered about."What is the point in that?
Teri Terry
All her life she'd had little interest in the workings of boys' minds, which she imagined only as a set of flimsy pinwheels turning in the direction of obvious things.
Omar El Akkad
Thanks to Scoop, I've learned a lot about how the male mind works, and as a result I've been having nightmares for months.
Yvonne Collins
Anne reveled in the world of color about her."Oh, Marilla," she exclaimed one Saturday morning, coming dancing in with her arms full of gorgeous boughs, "I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn't it? Look at these maple branches. Don't they give you a thrill--several thrills?
L.M. Montgomery
November is usually such a disagreeable month...as if the year had suddenly found out that she was growing old and could do nothing but weep and fret over it. This year is growing old gracefully...just like a stately old lady who knows she can be charming even with gray hair and wrinkles. We've had lovely days and delicious twilights.
L.M. Montgomery
The air was fresh and crisp and had a distinct smell which was a mixture of the dried leaves on the ground and the smoke from the chimneys and the sweet ripe apples that were still clinging onto the branches in the orchard behind the house.
Arlene Stafford-Wilson
We need only to close our eyes and we are back on the Third Line, walking up the lane, through the yard and entering the bright, warm kitchen. We are home again.
Arlene Stafford-Wilson
It might be high summer all about but inside me everything is fall. The lonesomeness of a sad, slow closing of days, knowing frost is nigh and wind needling through the cabin chinks is just around the bend. That's me, right now.
Guy Vanderhaeghe
November--with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes--days full of a fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines. Days with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise. Days when an exquisite melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake. But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees. What cared they? Old Tom had built his roof well, and his chimney drew.
L.M. Montgomery
When you reach voting age, we will take your opinion under consideration.
Allan Dare Pearce
If you believe that some opinions are in fact better than others, then you, too, are an elitist of sorts.
Michael Harris
You are not a bad person because you are gay. You are you because you are you and you were meant to be you so be you proudly.
Tegan Quin
In our society, defecation involves anindividual in activity which is defined as inconsistent withthe cleanliness and purity standards expressed in many of ourperformances. Such activity also causes the individual todisarrange his clothing and to 'go out of play," that is, todrop from his face the expressive mask that he employs inface-to-face interaction. At the same time ic becomes difficultfor him to reassemble his personal front should the need toenter into interaction suddenly occur. Perhaps that is areason why toilet doors in our society have locks on them.
Erving Goffman
It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliché, are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
Marshall McLuhan
The church and the scientific community are fighting at times a common enemy: the truth religion cannot deny and the positivist materialist scientist is unable to explain.
Paul Greene
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
To embrace the belief that man is the accidental product of a random and otherwise genetically and biologically impossible Darwinian gradual evolution allegedly monitored by a quasi-fictitious natural selection, a process that supposedly started with an amoeba nobody knows how it arrived on Earth that somehow became a fish with stumps for legs that turned crocodile, a creature that following successive transmutations “evolved” into an ape that ended up as Leonardo Da Vinci is an attitude that comes in conflict with the scientific method of research and it certainly violates its standard principles.
Paul Greene
Life on Earth is not the result of a series of miracles performed by a supernatural god-creator, and it is definitely not a product of matter having a mind of its own, of an equally miraculous evolutionary process supervised by Lady Natural Selection who would turn rabbits into lions.
Paul Greene
That everything in nature has “the appearance” of design is not exactly evidence against design. According to Dawkins, though, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is almost certainly something else.
Paul Greene
… between the irrational promoted in churches and the Darwinian pseudo-science taught in schools, a revolution in the way we understand reality is not only necessary but also long overdue.
Paul Greene
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.
Jane Jacobs
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
Malcolm Gladwell
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
Margaret Atwood
You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.
Margaret Atwood
If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in. We are desperate with our dreams. What - oh, what - does that say?
Steven Erikson
It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.
Margaret Atwood
They're gone. I let them chase me. I led them like a sunbeam and vanished like a shadow.
Erin Bow
This afternoon I sat at my window and alternately wrote at my new serial and watched a couple of dear, amusing, youngish maple-trees at the foot of the garden. They whispered secrets to each other all the afternoon. They would bend together and talk earnestly for a few moments, then spring back and look at each other, throwing up their hands comically in horror and amazement over their mutual revelations. I wonder what new scandal is afoot in Treeland.
L.M. Montgomery
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity...and some scare see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.—William Blake (1757-1827)
Hilary Scharper
Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.
Jo Walton
Johanna bent her head far back to look up into the leafy canopy and the rainy sky. There was a cautious wonder on her face. She said something in Kiowa in a low voice. So much water, such giant trees, each possessing a spirit. Drops like jewels cascaded from their spidery hands.
Paulette Jiles
...but maybe it's just the genetic code of a teenager. If your parents forbid something, you have to want it.
Brynna Gabrielson
Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929
John Vaillant
This is the thing about school dances. They make like it's supposed to be this other-worldly thing, but really it's just the people you see every day dressed up, standing in the gym in the dark with Red Hot Chili Peppers playing.
Mariko Tamaki
If you love her. If you want her to stay. Fight for her.
Janet Gurtler The Truth About Us
She was young and alive, untouchable. Why did she want to go?
Courtney Summers
Post-adolescent Expert SyndromeThe tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-21 range. "Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard.
Douglas Coupland
People imprison themselves.
Bruce Crown
In my view, it is an error to think about 'alternatives to prison' if what we mean by that is 'electronic bracelets,' through which people are subject to computer-monitored house arrest, or granting fuller surveillance and disciplinary powers and technologies to other state agencies, such as welfare and mental health, through 'transcarceration' policies...We need to decrease, not increase, the means by which the state, in its multifarious networks of authority, controls human lives and selectively incapacitates people who, no less than others, have the potential to contribute to the improvement of hte human condition.
Karlene Faith