Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 122

Gather close, and let us speak of nasty little shits. Oh, come now, we are no strangers to the vicious demons in placid disguises, innocent eyes so wide, hidden minds so dark. Does evil exist? Is it a force, some deadly possession that slips into the unwary? Is it a thing separate and thus subject to accusation and blame, distinct from the one it has used? Does it flit from soul to soul, weaving its diabolical scheme in all the unseen places, snarling into knots tremulous fears and appalling opportunity, stark terrors and brutal self-interest? Or is the dread word nothing more than a quaint and oh so convenient encapsulation of all those traits distinctly lacking moral context, a sweeping generalization embracing all things depraved and breath takingly cruel, a word to define that peculiar glint in the eye—the voyeur to one’s own delivery of horror, of pain and anguish and impossible grief?Give the demon crimson scales, slashing talons. Tentacles and dripping poison. Three eyes and six slithering tongues. As it crouches there in the soul, its latest abode in an eternal succession of abodes, may every god kneel in prayer.But really. Evil is nothing but a word, an objectification where no objectification is necessary. Cast aside this notion of some external agency as the source of inconceivable inhumanity—the sad truth is our possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that is moral within us.But if that is too dire, let’s call it evil. And paint it with fire and venom.There are extremities of behaviour that seem, at the time, perfectly natural, indeed reasonable. They are arrived at suddenly, or so it might seem, but if one looks the progression reveals itself, step by step, and that is a most sad truth.
Steven Erikson
Left unaddressed, chronic anxiety can disrupt many aspects of development, including a child's capacity to learn and ability to connect socially as well as the opportunity for the brain to grow and make connections. In time, children with high levels of anxiety are more likely to face depression, turn to substance use, become less likely to finish high school and may therefore have a harder time keeping a job or managing financially.
Michele Kambolis
Awful things, children. Needy, self-centered tyrants, the boys all teeth and firsts, the girls all claws and spit. Gathering into sniveling packs and sniffing out vulnerabilities — and woe to the child not cunning enough to hide their own — the others would close in like the grubby shark they were. Great pastime, savaging someone.
Steven Erikson
Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.
Margaret Atwood
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
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
I'm afraid of those cows,' protested poor Dora, seeing a prospect of escape.'The very idea of your being scared of those cows,' scoffed Davy. 'Why, they're both younger than you.
L.M. Montgomery
But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
Margaret Atwood
... be radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness...
Ann Voskamp
Conversing with children is a fine art.... An art form that demands large amounts of both honesty and misdirection. Or maybe discretion is a better word.
Miriam Toews
The move towards the extension of personhood to children is already underway, and is utterly, completely and totally unstoppable!
Stefan Molyneux
It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels
Douglas Coupland
I will continue to freak out my children by knitting in public. It's good for them.
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
I'm planting a tree to teach me to gather strength from my deepest roots.
Andrea Koehle Jones
To be a climber one has to accept that gratification is rarely immediate.
Bernadette McDonald
Karate is many things, but mainly it's about synergy, ebb and flow, trial and error, action and reaction, rhythm of life, progress . . .
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
Real Martial Arts is Mathematics, Physics, Poetry; Meditation in Action
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
Knowledge comes from learning. Wisdom comes from living.
Anthony Douglas Williams
With Nectar in your Mind instead of Thinking, you have Understanding and Wisdom
John de Ruiter
With Nectar in your Mind instead of Thinking, you have Understanding band Wisdom
John de Ruiter
Every day I grow in the wisdom that my soul is vibrationally connected to the Universe.
Debbie A. Anderson
Love does not have gender. Love is not exclusive! Our hearts have the capacity to love so many people. The only tragedy is when fear, cultural barriers, ridiculous misunderstandings, or arbitrary numbers prevent us from experiencing the joy we could have.
Nadia Scrieva
Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy. (Page 57)
Ann Voskamp
How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering. The converse does. (Page 58)
Ann Voskamp
It is true, I never stop wanting to learn the hard eucharisteo for deathbeds and dark skies and the prodigal sons. But I accept this is the way to begin, and all hard things come in due time and with practice. Yet now wisps of cheese tell me gentle that this is the first secret step into euchaisteo's miracle. Gratitude for the seemingly insignificant - a seed - this plants the giant miracle. The miracle of eucharisteo, like the Last Supper, is in the eating of crumbs, the swallowing down one mouthful. Do not disdain the small. The whole of life - even the hard - is made up of the minute parts, and if I miss the infinitesimals, I miss the whole. (Page 57)
Ann Voskamp
Time, what God first deemed holy above all else (Genesis 2:3). Thank God for the time, and very God enters that time, presence hallowing it.... I awake to I AM here. When I'm present, I meet I AM, the very presence of a present God. (page 70)
Ann Voskamp
Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting—that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art—and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strangers, be it a smile, a pat on the shoulder or a word of praise, is truly a comfort.
Yann Martel
You can be sunk low or as a skunk and still have a joy in your heart. Joy lives like one of those spinning things---a gyroscope in your heart. It doesn't seem to have any connection to circumstance, good or bad.
Polly Horvath
I will not stop singingthe Muses who set me dancing.
Anne Carson
Joy is a flame that glimmers only in the palm of the open and humble hand. In an open and humble palm, released and surrendered to receive, light dances, flickers happy. The moment the hand is clenched tight, fingers all pointing towards self and rights and demands, joy is snuffed out. Anger is the lid that suffocates joy until she lies limp and lifeless.
Ann Voskamp
The joy of small that makes life large.
Ann Voskamp
Adults envy the open-hearted and open-minded explorations of children; seeing their joy and curiosity, we pine for our own capacity for wide-eyed wonder.
Gabor Maté
While I may not always feel joy, God asks me to give thanks in all things because He knows that the feeling of joy begins in the action of thanksgiving.
Ann Voskamp
photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself…
Rebecca McNutt
Life is so funny sometimes that you just have to laugh.
Rebecca McNutt
Joy is not something you look for, it is simply something you have to choose to apply.
Réné Gaudette
Joy. In every breath. In every moment. In every turn of the blossom to face the sun. In every stream of juice that trails my chin from fruit so sweet. In Him. In the coolness of the evening when He walks beside us and His laughter lifts across the river as He delights in our wonder over this place He has given us. In silence. In starlight. In shouting an anthem of gladness that shakes the earth and hails birds into flight.
Alanna Rusnak
Awe ignites joy because it makes us bend the knee.
Ann Voskamp
The young man murmured in his sleep and said, “Dear Sparrow,” and Sparrow felt, for the first time, how the purest joy could be a heaviness.
Madeleine Thien
There is something joyful about storms, that interrupt routine. Snow or freezing rain suddenly releases you from expectations, performance demands, and the tyranny of appointments and schedules. And unlike illness, it is largely a corporate, rather than individual experience. One could almost hear a unified sigh rise from the nearby city and surrounding countryside, where nature has intervened to give respite to the weary humans slogging it out within her purview. All those affected this way are united by a mutual excuse, and the heart is suddenly, and unexpectedly, a little giddy. There will be no apologies needed for not showing up to some commitment or other. Everyone understands and shares in this singular justification, and the sudden alleviation of the pressure to produce makes the heart merry....Even if it's hardly more than a day or two, somehow each person feels like the master of his or her own world, simply because those little droplets of water freeze as they hit the ground. Even commonplace activities become extraordinary. Routine choices become adventures and are often experienced with a sense of heightened clarity.
William Paul Young
For awhile, I was left with nothing on the physical plane. I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.
Eckhart Tolle
And so silence and ...darkness hold happiness and joy?" he said softly."Assuredly," she said, "provided one listens to the silence and gazes deeply into the darkness. Everything is there. Everything.
Mary Balogh
Look for Joy: that's God's echo, and his footprint. Happiness . . . happiness and wittiness and cleverness do not count for much when the darkness falls. Joy is tougher.
Sean Stewart
Joy doesn't ever leave, you know. It's always with you. And one day you'll find it again.
Louise Penny
Is the height of my chara joy dependent on the depths of my eucharisteo thanks?
Ann Voskamp
She was becoming sad. There is no joy involved in following others' expectations of yourself.
Miriam Toews
When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us?
Ann Voskamp
Stress isn't only a joy stealer. The way we respond to it can be sin.
Ann Voskamp
I'd rather laugh in a tent than cry in a palace.
James Enns
We find these joys to be self evident: That all children are created whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, worthy of respect. The embodiment of life, liberty and happiness, children are original blessings, here to learn their own song. Every girl and boy is entitled to love, to dream and belong to a loving “village.” And to pursue a life of purpose.We affirm our duty to nourish and nurture the young, to honour their caring ideals as the heart of being human. To recognize the early years as the foundation of life, and to cherish the contribution of young children to human evolution.We commit ourselves to peaceful ways and vow to keep from harm or neglect these, our most vulnerable citizens. As guardians of their prosperity we honour the bountiful Earth whose diversity sustains us. Thus we pledge our love for generations to come.
Raffi Cavoukian
My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking. You could be raped a thousand times and still be a virgin. I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel, the comfort women and teenage porno stars. Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky could fail me, I didn’t care. I’d pass just with the bibliography. I was compiling a list of every single book I’d read or that I wanted to read that was about power and sex. High school should have a whole fucking course on just this. I was helping the school make curriculum…I was writing my essay, writing easily now. I didn’t have a reader anymore like Lee or Chris but I imagined that I was writing for them both. Maybe I was writing for anyone who could fucking stand me.
Tamara Faith Berger
I Don’t Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness: I don’t know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away my Body: I don’t know that I wouldn’t deny my Christ, if I had one, three times before a given cockcrow: I don’t know on the other hand that I would: I don’t know whether honor is a reality in human beings or a pose: I don’t know that I mayn’t be able to think with my Body when it is in its coffin.
Mary MacLane
Elise hid her face in his shoulder, embarassed, "Kane! What will they think?" She whispered against his neck."That we're newly bonded and I can't keep my hands off of my lovely mate." And sure enough, the good natured calls that accompanied them across the yard left her in no doubt that the others were thinking exactly that.
Nicky Charles
Her attitude towards sex is very comforting to those of her friends who get into terrible states of passion and jealousy, and feel cut loose from their moorings. She seems to regard sex as a wholesome, slightly silly indulgence, like dancing and nice dinners--something that shouldn't interfere with people's being kind and cheerful to each other.
Alice Munro
Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or she’d get the giggles, a terrifying thought because the man might think you were laughing at him, at his dick, at its size, and that would be fatal.
Margaret Atwood
A Dom never takes away. He only builds.
Delaine Moore
You self-proclaimed "MILF" hunters have it all wrong -- we aren't the prey, YOU are. You are but a Service Male - a SMILF!
Delaine Moore
Most modern men want sex and can’t have it. They want success and never get it. They want money and never earn enough. Everybody has desires and nobody—Except the psychopathic few— Has the guts to go out and just take what they want.”—Professor Michael Friday
Barbie Wilde
There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh. We yearned for the future How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
Margaret Atwood
It had a sort of a head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an elbow or a knee.
Alice Munro