Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 126

As the legend goes, when the Phoenix resurrects from the flames, she is even more beautiful than before.
Danielle LaPorte
You’ve always been a stormYour lightning mouthElectrifies my heart
Holly Ducarte
She senses your vulnerability, and reassures that every dream you’ve ever whispered in the night, or secret desires you dared not speak, are all within the palm of her hand
Holly Ducarte
Lugh goes first always first an I follow on behind. An that's fine. That's right. That's how it's meant to be.
Moira Young
In our lifetimes, we can only know a small portion of what exists. The world is endless and its treasures are inexhaustible.
Barry Webster
…Maybe I’ll be watching super-8 home videos,” Alecto told her, smiling bleakly. “I love my super-8 camera, it’s an Eastman Kodak one… Kodak stopped manufacturing them, the world went digital and now Kodak has stopped making Kodachrome film and all kinds of traditional film products… it’s sad.” “Well, uh… well, have fun watching your home movies then,” Mandy finished, but she didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
Rebecca McNutt
Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world because "all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,is not of the Father, but is of the world." This injunction is at best a paradox. Our humble and astonishing inheritance is the world and only the world, whose existence we constantly test (and prove) by telling ourselves stories about it. The suspicion that we and the world are made in the image of something wonderfully and chaotically coherent far beyond our grasp, of which we are also part; the hope that our exploded cosmos and we, its stardust, have an ineffable meaning and method; the delight in retelling the old metaphor of the world as a book we read and in which we too are read; the conceit that what we can know of reality is an imagination made of language — all this finds its material manifestation in that self-portrait we call a library. And our love for it, and our lust to see more of it, and our pride in its accomplishments as we wander through shelves full of books that promise more and more delights, are among our happiest, most moving proofs of possessing, in spite of all the miseries and sorrows of this life, a more intimate, consolatory, perhaps redeeming faith in a method behind the madness than any jealous deity could wish upon us.
Alberto Manguel
How promising today's generation is. They can whip out their cellular phones like sheep, instantly take a million digital photos of their cat and then just delete them. But I'd like to see these kids try to artfully use a traditional film camera or make a super 8 home movie. Traditional film takes integrity, nostalgia, effort, patience and imagination - things that the 21st century has very little of. Everything these days, even a superior medium like film photography with an extensively vivid history and an iconic meaning, is becoming disposable in this age.
Rebecca McNutt
They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.
Margaret Atwood
In her eyes was the reflection of everything that mattered: old diners with neon signs, vinyl records, celluloid film, drive-in movies, Pears soap, department stores, her brother’s old blue Camaro car and the smell of coal dust in the rainy sky of a summer lightning storm.…And all the nice bright colors of the past that she thought were gone for good came flowing back into her life like a wave of nostalgia flooding over her, reds, yellows, blues and greens drenching her gray memories in psychedelic ribbons and glittering fireworks.…She hoped that the world would always hold those miniscule yet beautiful, deep and mysterious traces of memory.
Rebecca McNutt
Oh, I’m Chrissy Mackenzie, I’m from Vancouver but I came here to study environmental journalism,” the girl exclaimed with way too much enthusiasm. “You got any advice?”“Search me,” Mandy muttered, spooning another ice cube from the empty glass on the table in front of her. “I like pollution, I write in favor of it, and environmental journalism most often implies that it’s in favor of all that “go green” hippie crap.” “Oh, well….” Chrissy seemed taken aback, offended, and Mandy sighed a fourth time. “Damn it, I’m really sorry,” she apologized, smiling dismally at the aspiring writer. “It’s just been a really lousy day for me and I wasn’t really thinking. My advice? Find your own cause to represent, not one thrown out into society by a ton of environmentalist dopes. Find something new, something you think could be improved, and work from there.” Chrissy smiled with a look of total ecstasy as if the words of some nobody woman were important. Mandy momentarily noticed the groups of laughing, drunk, giggling people, all acting childish… and for a moment she wished she could be them.
Rebecca McNutt
The measure of a country’s prosperity should not be how many poor people drive cars, but how many affluent people use public transportation.
Michael Hogan
Are you sad?" Nicola asked. Richard turned in the chair. The scissors became motionless."Yes. I am sad. I'm sad most of the time.""Does it bother you?""It never used to. But now it does. Very much.""It's because the world disappoints you," Nicola said. She set down hers scissors. "It continually fails to surprise you. It fails to be as wonderful as you long for it to be. This is where your sadness comes from.
Andrew Kaufman
I don’t want anything else bad to happen,” she whispered, her voice choked with tears. “I’m so sick to death of bad things happening, of seeing bad things that happened in the past! And I’m guilty of so many things. I’m sorry that I killed Mrs. Matthias and wrecked her stupid greenhouse back in the Eighties and I’m sorry I left you here alone while I went around the world.”“I wasn’t alone though, I knew you were doing what you wanted to do and that you were still alive, so I wasn’t really alone, I knew you were still there somewhere,” Alecto told her. His damaged smile and downcast, sorrowful eyes were draped in the shadow of the night, saving Mandy the trouble of seeing.
Rebecca McNutt
That is one good thing about this world…there are always sure to be more springs.
L.M. Montgomery
If nothing else, it's pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.
Emily St. John Mandel
They can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants. Safety is not what it wants. The material world is not what it wants either.
Kathleen Winter
Trust that some of the best days of your life haven’t even happened yet. There are going to be parties that leave you dancing until 6am, spontaneous adventures that teach you more than you ever learned in a classroom. There are going to be nights that will stay burned beneath your eyelids, memories that dance underneath your skin. Life is going to exceed your expectations, it is going to astonish you with its timing.Remember — you have not felt it all.The world still has so much left for you
Bianca Sparacino
Heroes can save the world, but villains can change it.
J.M. Frey
Newspapers take peoples’ tragedies and force the world to experience all of it.
Rebecca McNutt
No, I mean I'm sorry that you've inherited such a miserable, collapsing Old Country. A place where rich Bankers own everything, where you've got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you don't get sick, where --
Cory Doctorow
It was a brave old world.
Mark A. Rayner
Don’t you dare come into my world and tell me what color the ocean is! It’s black. Black as midnight. Black and awful!
Nadia Scrieva
The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
Alberto Manguel
If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.
Alberto Manguel
In the moral realm, there is very little consensus left in Western countries over the proper basis of moral behavior. And because of the power of the media, for millions of men and women the only venue where moral questions are discussed and weighed is the talk show, where more often than not the primary aim is to entertain, even shock, not to think. When Geraldo and Oprah become the arbiters of public morality, when the opinion of the latest media personality is sought on everything from abortion to transvestites, when banality is mistaken for profundity because [it's] uttered by a movie star or a basketball player, it is not surprising that there is less thought than hype. Oprah shapes more of the nation's grasp of right and wrong than most of the pulpits in the land. Personal and social ethics have been removed from the realms of truth and structures of thoughts; they have not only been relativized, but they have been democratized and trivialized.
D A Carson
The world is larger and more beautiful than my little struggle.
Ravi Zacharias
How To Be An Explorer Of The World1. Always Be LOOKING (notice the ground beneath your feet.)2. Consider Everything Alive & Animate3. EVERYTHING Is Interesting. Look Closer.4. Alter Your Course Often.5. Observe For Long Durations (and short ones).6. Notice The Stories Going On Around You.7. Notice PATTERNS. Make CONNECTIONS.8. DOCUMENT Your Findings (field notes) In A VAriety Of Ways.9. Incorporate Indeterminacy.10. Observe Movement.11. Create a Personal DIALOGUE With Your Environment. Talk to it.12. Trace Things Back to Their ORIGINS.13. Use ALL of the Senses In Your Investigations.
Keri Smith
But I believe I rather like superstitious people. They lend color to life. Wouldn't it be a rather drab world if everybody was wise and sensible . . . and good? What would we find to talk about?
L.M. Montgomery
The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?Doesn't that make life a story?
Yann Martel
We crave magic because we are magic. We crave power because we are pure power.
Vironika Tugaleva
There are few things more powerful than people united.
Vironika Tugaleva
There are some people, she says, not many, who have within them the power to change things. The courage to act in the service of somethin greater than themselves.
Moira Young
The car housed a hysterical bumper sticker: Save the Planet, and I permitted a moment of contemplation to truly bask in this thought. Save the planet? What a joke. Save the planet from what? From ourselves? And save it for what? For ourselves? It was a kind of perpetual stupidity in a tug-of-war battle over trivial matters. Only imbeciles see things in black and white: liberal or conservative, yes or no, this or that. Those in power laugh at those people in their morally inverted shades of grey, basking in the labels they've created so the people are easier to control.
Bruce Crown
You see what I am driving at. The mentally handicapped do not have a consciousness of power. Because of this perhaps their capacity for love is more immediate, lively and developed than that of other men. They cannot be men of ambition and action in society and so develop a capacity for friendship rather than for efficiency. They are indeed weak and easily influenced, because they confidently give themselves to others; they are simple certainly, but often with a very attractive simplicity. Their first reaction is often one of welcome and not of rejection or criticism. Full of trust, they commit themselves deeply. Who amongst us has not been moved when met by the warm welcome of our boys and girls, by their smiles, their confidence and their outstretched arms. Free from the bonds of conventional society, and of ambition, they are free, not with the ambitious freedom of reason, but with an interior freedom, that of friendship. Who has not been struck by the rightness of their judgments upon the goodness or evil of men, by their profound intuition on certain human truths, by the truth and simplicity of their nature which seeks not so much to appear to be, as to be. Living in a society where simplicity has been submerged by criticism and sometimes by hypocrisy, is it not comforting to find people who can be aware, who can marvel? Their open natures are made for communion and love.
Jean Vanier
What people instinctively regard as cool is real power - consistency. Pathetic is not cool. Being locked in a tragedy, but not knowing it. That's lameness.
Cory Duchesne
Laws decide wich forms of oppression are allowed, Lord. And because of that, those laws are servants to those in power, for whom oppression is given as a right over those who have little or no power.
Steven Erikson
People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.
Rachel Cusk
Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.
David Brooks
They are me, these women. They are the ones who taught me to see; I taught me to see. They, we, are the ones healing the Ginen story, fighting to destroy that cancerous trade in shiploads of African bodies that ever demands to be fed more sugar, more rum, more Nubian gold.
Nalo Hopkinson
We are all here, all the powers of the Ginen lives for all the centuries that they have been in existence, and we all fight. We change when change is needed. We are a little different in each place that the Ginen have come to rest, and any one of is already many powers. No cancer can fell us all, no blight cover us completely.
Nalo Hopkinson
Friends are like the stars that glow in the sky... you don't always see them, but you know they're always there overhead, and even when it's cloudy, snowy or stormy, even when the power goes out and you're trapped in darkness, they'll always find a way to shine through to you.
Rebecca McNutt
This isn't the work of our people, Delilah. It's a corruption of power. The gods are neutral, good and evil manifests in the deeds of mortals.''Or, just maybe-- The power is our own and the credit horribly misplaced.
Kurtis J. Wiebe
In rational worlds all the hierarchies of our world are reversed.
Bruce Crown
Power breeds resentment and withers the slow-growing plant that is trust, and people who use it to capture others not only fail to make friends but often end up captives themselves. And perhaps what is sadder still is that when you control other people you take away all that there might be in a real encounter with them and replace it with your fears. And while you might get gratitude for a while, or guilt and tears, you won't get what they had to offer if you'd let them give you what was really in their hearts.
Merle Shain
Some people," Aunt Emily answered sharply, "are so busy seeing all sides of every issue that they neutralize concern and prevent necessary action. There's no strength in seeing all sides unless you can act where real measurable injustice exists. A lot of academic talk just immobilizes the oppressed and maintains oppressors in their positions of power.
Joy Kogawa
There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with. In the paint of the washroom cubicle someone unknown had scratched: Aunt Lydia sucks. It was like a flag waved from a hilltop in rebellion. The mere idea of Aunt Lydia doing such a thing was in itself heartening. So now I imagine, among these Angels and their drained white brides, momentous grunts and sweating, damp furry encounters; or, better, ignominious failures, cocks like three-week-old carrots, anguished fumblings upon flesh cold and unresponding as uncooked fish.
Margaret Atwood
All ponzi schemes are upheld by a centripetal force caused by those orbiting the circles of power, celebrity and wealth and trying to get in. When the ponzi scheme reaches its point of maximum growth, the force disperses and the ponzi scheme collapses.
Heather Marsh
All of society’s problems which could be solved by money, were caused by money.
Heather Marsh
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
A situation only has the power over us that we give it. We own the power over ourselves! We own that! No one else! When we realize that: we now have a CHOICE we can make, we can STOP giving that power away! Own yourself. Own YOUR power!
Akiroq Brost
I encourage you, to take control to take back your power. Make the time and effort to invest in yourself. Self-care and healing. Taking time for stillness and contemplation. Reflect on your own behaviour. Decide what kind of person you want to be and then take the steps to be that person.
Akiroq Brost
The worst feeling in the world is not losing your friend forever, but rather having patronizing people tell you that the love you have for your friend and the connection and emotion you have towards them is an illness to be cured, a problem to be covered up and hidden away by the power of mood-altering drugs. I used to trust doctors when I was younger... now I've lost my trust in all mental health professionals forever.
Rebecca McNutt
I had tasted power and I had used it up, but now I would get more of another kind. We would share it, and keep each other from the dark.
E.K. Johnston
The goal of argumentation is to make a case so forceful (note the metaphor) that skeptics are coerced into believing it—they are powerless to deny it while still claiming to be rational. In principle, it is the ideas themselves that are, as we say, compelling, but their champions are not always averse to helping the ideas along with tactics of verbal dominance, among them intimidation (“Clearly . . .”), threat (“It would be unscientific to . . .”), authority (“As Popper showed . . .”), insult (“This work lacks the necessary rigor for . . .”), and belittling (“Few people today seriously believe that . . .”). Perhaps this is why H. L. Mencken wrote that “college football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students.
Steven Pinker
The culture of power versus the power of culture,” he quoted. “One side always loses.
Ausma Zehanat Khan
I called the desert into a storm.
Alwyn Hamilton
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
Kreon: here are Kreon's verbs for todayAdjudicateLegislateScandalizeCapitalizehere are Kreon's nounsMenReasonTreasonDeathShip of StateMineChorus: "mine" isn't a nounKreon: it is if you capitalize it
Anne Carson
...the magic was a tool, though a natural, mysterious tool. In its awareness of the magic, his human nature had desired to connect with it, to use it. The whisperings were the voice of his own awakening, not the seductive call of a dark power. Using it was not corruption, but a natural extension of his being. And he could control the manner in which he used it. He would.
Derek Donais