Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 124

Never underestimate the power of a pity fuck, which makes for about ninety percent of women’s collective dating history.
Alice Walsh
It made a romantic tale. The young rouge, cheating death, returning to his grieving lover. But in reality? Ashyn had always known life did not resemble one of her book stories or Moria's bard tales, and yet there was a part of her that hoped it did. The more she saw, the more she realized she was wrong. People made up stories because that is what they wanted from their world. A place where goodness, kindness, and honor were rewarded. They were not rewarded. The people of Edgewood could attest to that. - Sea Of Shadows
Kelly Armstrong
In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differe in our own realities from the way we are seen by others.
Michael Ondaatje
Most people, if philosophy touches them, they shatter, they atomize, they turn to dust. It is win/lose between philosophy and delusion, and most people are almost entirely composed of delusion. They're only allowed as much reality as serves the masters. But they're not allowed any reality which disturbs their masters...
Stefan Molyneux
She knew that sex was a means of getting ahead and saw nothing wrong in exploiting male weaknesses for her own purposes.
Alice Walsh
After four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.
Peter Watts
Facts do not fall in the face of discomfort.
Stefan Molyneux
I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.
Peter Watts
Some churches, sects, cults, or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretation of reality.
Eckhart Tolle
Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.
Peter Watts
Reality is neurology, and is not absolute.
David Cronenberg
Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
Rachel Cusk
Some churches, sects, cults or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretation of reality.
Eckhart Tolle
Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don’t know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.
Eckhart Tolle
We’re all monsters, sweetheart. Some of us just hide it better than others.
Bethany-Kris
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” This touches on the heart of the argumentum ad populum fallacy. Physical reality does not require belief to sustain it, and belief will not modify the rules of the universe.
Armin Navabi
When we assess someone's life or health on the basis of surface-level observations or passing comments, it presents us with a very flawed version of reality.
Evita Ochel
One truism lay underneath every choice and word: change what people think and you change the world.
Michael R. Fletcher
We're told to plug our nosesto escape the smells. Manure.Rot.Poverty?Reality.
Holly Bodger
Susie: Maybe we're all making everything up as we go.
Martine Leavitt
WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, Papa used to tell me that words fly on wild winds from the mouths of sly people. When the winds pick up, he said, sand blows into your ears and bites your eyes. Storms build overhead like a lake with a spout, but you can’t see or hear. Only when you are safely sheltered, Papa said, can you tell which way the wind is blowing. Only from the calm, he said, can you see how to protect yourself from trouble.
Lawrence Hill
Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation…
Northrop Frye
There are just some things that are outside of comprehension, even if we can quantify them. At some point, science becomes magic.
Jay Hosking
True Martial Arts is universal, simple and practical. Anything else is too complex to be used in combat.
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.
Rachel Cusk
I wonder if I talk like a dead man. My daughter once came home from school very excited about some lecture -this was years ago, before I died, though just right before- and she said her English teacher had talked about what the dead sound like in Dante. This funny thing about Dante's dead, which is that they know the past, and even the future, but they don't know the present. About the present they have all these questions for Dante. And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the time. She seemed to feel that really meant something. That and also that the dead know themselves better than the living do.
Rivka Galchen
We imagine all these postapocalyptic, class-stratified, new-world-order techno-futures. But actually the real world, the world we live in, this is the dystopia.
Elan Mastai
The truth is, there are no alternate realities. At least not the way Penny describes them. Maybe an infinite multiverse is born from every action, whether it’s two atoms colliding or two people. Maybe reality is constantly fluctuating around us, but our senses aren’t equipped to detect those quantum variations. Maybe that’s what our senses are, an ungainly organic sieve through which the chaos of existence is filtered into something manageable enough that you can get out of bed in the morning . Maybe the totality of what we perceive with our senses is as clumsy a portrait of reality as a child’s chalk drawing on a sidewalk compared to the face of the woman you’re already falling in love with lying next to you in a mess of sheets and blankets, her lips still pursed as they pull away from your mouth.
Elan Mastai
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
Anne Carson
But that is what life is all about, he said. "It is about dreaming and making those dreams come true with effort and determination - and love.
Mary Balogh
The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.
Malcolm Gladwell
Some women just aren’t cut out to be mothers, and unfortunately it had taken Susanna three kids to realize she was one of them.
Kelley Armstrong
Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics....Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that’s all.
Leonard Peikoff
What goes on inside isn't ever the same as what goes on outside.
Margaret Laurence
Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore
Leonard Cohen
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.
Margaret Atwood
Because he is good and kind,” she explained softly, then went on. “Because he treats me like a princess. Because he makes me laugh. Because he makes me happy. Because he took the trouble to read to me when I could not read to myself. Because he fed me and gave me wine when I could not eat or drink at balls. Because when he kisses me my toes curl, and when he makes love to me I cannot contain my passion.
Lynsay Sands
Love, is there even a true description other than knowing your heart will cease to beat without that certain someone in your life?-Rusty Blackwood
Rusty Blackwood
A perfect example, in matters of life and death, of love and passion, of choice or destiny; options decrease to a singular course.
Bruce Crown
The word love has been so abused by publicity and advertisements that we no longer know really what it means.
Jean Vanier
In your heart, you have a song that will change the world, once you give yourself permission to sing.
Vironika Tugaleva
That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.
Rachel Cusk
The antidote to exhaustion may not be rest but wholeheartedness... we are typically exhausted because we are not doing our TRUE work.
Gordon T. Smith
Something is askew when our passion for the truth blinds us to other perspectives and to the grace to be able to differ graciously from others and learn from others who may see things very differently than we do.
Gordon T. Smith
Follow your passion, be prepared to work hard and sacrifice, and, above all, don't let anyone limit your dreams
Donovan Bailey
She wanted to remind him, whether his family was there or not. She wanted. And wanted. And endured in her wanting: the damp seat, the dry chicken, more champagne, the headache the champagne brought, the midges, the chat, his failure, no refusal, to look, look at me, I caused a thunderstorm with my passion and I sit here shaking under my skin and you don't notice because you're trying so hard not to notice, but all the people at the table there are really only you and me and you know it, the air is charged with it, it's a heat, a hot wind, and Marina and Seely are a sham next to it, Annabel ceases to exist, is simply obliterated in the gale of it, this isn't a fantasy, not my imagination, I can tell by the way you lift your fork, by the set of your jaw, by that sixth cigarette you are smoking me, or would if you could; but how long can we sustain it, how long till eruption, till the storm returns again and they can all see what it is, what it really is?
Claire Messud
Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought.
David Brooks
Passion is not what gives you bliss or makes you happy 24/7, but what you're willing to suffer for, what you genuinely believe to be worth the sacrifice.
Justine Musk
She'd just thrown gasoline on the fire. Now it was up to fandom to keep it burning.
Danika Stone
She turned his hand over, tracing letters into his palm. I…L.O.V.E…Y.O.U…
Danika Stone
I could go and buy one of the islands in theBahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build andcreate a new company.
Elon Musk
...what will happen to us this night will resemble a flame consuming the icy desert, a shower of stars reflected in a piece of a mirror that in the darkness suddenly fell out of its frame to warn its owner about the proximity of death. It'll resemble the shepherd's pipe and the music that has not been written yet.
Sasha Sokolov
Amazing relationships aren't about making one perfect choice in your choice of partner. They're about the infinite amount of choices you make in each conflict, each conversation, and each moment to open yourself and to stay open, even when it's hard.
Vironika Tugaleva
I need to use my mind in a way that slows the out-of-control beating in my chest. The darkness around us could be anywhere, anytime. I could be alive or dead. Okay, I choose alive. While I’m at it, I choose the darkness to be a gentle blanket on a moonless night, where I rest a few feet from a boy who’s warm and sweet. When he holds me, his heart beats strong with what I tell myself is passion, not fear.
Jeanne Ryan
Ashtadukht slumped and let thenightingale’s song flood her brain. She knew that empty tone, that defeatedoutlook; she knew it intimately. Even now, it burned in her as limply as asnuffed flame. Passion burned with unchecked verve, devoured its fuel, andsputtered out. Despair required no upkeep; it heaped barely-glowing coals inthe back of your mind and fuelled itself.
Darrell Drake
To have no desire is such a load of bullshit--forgive me for being so blunt. To have no passion in one's life is a cop-out for cowards.
Irina Kovalyova
This form of love is like the painof childbirth: so intenseit's hard to remember afterwards,
Margaret Atwood
Messy love is better than none.I guess. I'm no authorityon sane living.
Margaret Atwood
Only remember: I am not the ease, but the end.I am not to blind you, but to find you.What you think is the sirens singing to lure you to your doom is only the voice of the inevitable, welcoming you after so long a wait. I was made only for you.
Elizabeth Smart
Do what you love, and the money will come. And if it doesn't, you won't care, because you'll be happy.
Danielle Krysa