Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 134

The bad part is life continues. The good part is that the pain goes away.
Mary Balogh
...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.
Anne Michaels
The look he gave her made her turn away for a moment. Sometimes you couldn’t look too closely at another person’s pain.
Michelle Sagara West
Falling in love was as much about receiving as it was giving, was it? It seemed selfish. It was not, though. It was the opposite. Keeping oneself from being loved was to refuse the ultimate gift. He had thought himself done with romantic love. He had thought himself an incurable cynic. He was not, though.He was only someone whose heart and mind, and very soul, had been battered and bruised. It was still - and always - safe to give since there was a certain deal of control to be exerted over giving. Taking, or allowing oneself to receive, was an altogether more risky business. For receiving meant opening up the heart again.Perhaps to rejection.Or disillusionment.Or pain.Or even heart break.It was all terribly risky.And all terribly necessary.And of course, there was the whole issue of trust...
Mary Balogh
Other times, I look at my scars and see something else: a girl who was trying to cope with something horrible that she should never have had to live through at all. My scars show pain and suffering, but they also show my will to survive. They're part of my history that'll always be there.
Cheryl Rainfield
When someone stabs you it's not your fault that you feel pain.
Louise Penny
When pain brings you down, don't be silly, don't close your eyes and cry, you just might be in the best position to see the sun shine.
Alanis Morissette
But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
Margaret Atwood
There are few things more powerful than people united. What they unite over is not what matters. ... The most important aspect is remembering our existing connection, and, through that, allowing ourselves to feel at peace.
Vironika Tugaleva
Cell phones are certainly not necessary, and "but I'm from the digital age, this is what everyone in my generation is doing!" isn't a very good excuse for being hooked on a glowing screen 24/7. In the 1960's every teen of the times was tripping on acid and running off to find themselves in communes and love buses. It was a fad, there was no excuse for it and it passed, just like I think that this generation's "cell phones are necessary for socialization" fad will eventually pass. What will it bring afterwards? I don't even want to know, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope that it isn't anything else digital.
Rebecca McNutt
If you are for gun control, then you are not against guns, because the guns will be needed to disarm people. So it’s not that you are anti-gun. You’ll need the police’s guns to take away other people’s guns. So you’re very pro-gun; you just believe that only the Government (which is, of course, so reliable, honest, moral and virtuous…) should be allowed to have guns. There is no such thing as gun control. There is only centralizing gun ownership in the hands of a small political elite and their minions.
Stefan Molyneux
Peace is not the absence of war—peace is the absence of fear.
Ursula Franklin
Peace is not the absence of war but the absence of fear.
Ursula Franklin
When you establish peace, when you etablish love, when you establish kindness here [inside], you cannot act any other way to the outside world.
Mimi Ikonn
Life is not a sport. Life is not math. There is no final end goal and there is no right answer. Just because your truth does not match someone else's truth does not make either of you wrong. Life is not a zero sum game. If I am right, that does not make you wrong. If you are right, that does not make me wrong either. A jar of vinegar can sit in a cupboard beside a box of baking soda peacefully, and we can allow those who disagree with us to exist alongside us without reacting to them. There is nothing to prove. There is enough room in the world for all of us.
Vironika Tugaleva
Whenever you find your mind wandering to the past or future, pull yourself back into the present. Making peace, working through forgiveness of yourself and others over whatever happened in the past will help you to not revisit the past. Acceptance is an important tool when dealing with all that happened before the present moment. Remember, you cannot go back and change anything that has happened. Nothing at all. It was, what is was. You are here now, in the present, and as such, have the power to affect only the present.
Akiroq Brost
Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” We can obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right. Because we have been doing something right, and it would be good to know what, exactly, it is.
Steven Pinker
You are your own sanctuary. Peace always comes from within. Find the things, the thoughts, and perspectives that allow you to cultivate peace within yourself. If you find your spirit disturbed, pull yourself back. Learn yourself. Learn how to manipulate and control your emotional state. Allow yourself to feel all your emotions, but with control, being able to choose when and where. Love yourself enough to create a safe haven of peace within yourself that you can then carry into any situation, into any storm.
Akiroq Brost
-And what would you do if you lost a child?-I would think I was going to die, Elena said. But I wouldn't. I learned long ago that I must give up my child to the earth, to God, to the world, to death, to the possibility of death, to the possibility of disease, and in doing so I became at peace. Because I had let my child go. And in letting the child go, I became colder, more distant, and more at peace. But I still loved the child, don't be wrong. As you love your child. I am sorry.
David Bergen
Why had peace given place so soon to turmoil? To two separate solitudes? Because peace had been without thought? Without...integrity?How could she have felt like that without love?Was love essential?Did it even exist - the love she had dreamed of her life?If it did, it was too late now for her to find it.Must she make do with this instead, then?Only this?Pleasure without love?
Mary Balogh
We work for peace every time we exercise authority with wisdom and authentic love.
Jean Vanier
Peace is the fruit of love, a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work -- hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss -- loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.
Jean Vanier
As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.
Steven Pinker
A feeling is not bottomless. once felt all the way through,a great peace greets you there
Alanis Morissette
Nobody can keep on being angry if she looks into the heart of a pansy for a little while.
L.M. Montgomery
They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.
Margaret Atwood
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
Eckhart Tolle
I hear the Wind Woman running with soft, soft footsteps over the hill. I shall always think of the wind as a personality. She is a shrew when she blows from the north -- a lonely seeker when she blows from the east -- a laughing girl when she comes from the west -- and tonight from the south a little grey fairy.
L.M. Montgomery
Lou stood at the kitchen sink, her eyes unfocused on her hazy reflection in the window. Outside the sky was fading from steely blue to indigo. The mountain range beyond was a solid sheet of black, cut out by a child's sloppy scissors.
Danika Stone
For a long time, they sat without speaking. The air outside was filled with the lilting sound of sparrows, the buzz of traffic on Main Street, and under that the faint lapping of waves on the lakeshore. Lou smiled. It wasn't the same, but it was better.And better, Lou thought, is a start.
Danika Stone
In his stupor, the forest had begun to change. The sounds were confusing, his eyes blurring in his exhaustion. He tugged another branch out of the way, gasping as a jagged twig poked through the palm of his hand, momentarily catching there. The pain was almost an afterthought, his fingers no longer working effectively.
Danika Stone
When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
Alanis Obomsawin
The father and daughter made their way north, through unknown sylvan paradises where only the owls and skunks know their way around. The hard work of paddling non-stop for many hours had long since stopped being difficult for Saweyimew. In spite of her beauty and grace, her back had grown strong and sinewy from years of canoe trips. She reveled in the exhilaration it always brought her, after the first few hours left her body insensible to pain or discomfort. Warm and tingly, lulled into peaceful contemplation by hours of the rhythmic paddling, the smell of the water, exotic blooms, animal musk. It all combined as one to make her feel so alive. Especially when it rained, and her body steamed against the cool drops, feeling invincible against the elements. The mountain of her father's back was like a rock against anything nature could throw against them. The stream of fragrant pipe-smoke still flowing from his lips, regardless of any obstacle. She felt at that moment, nothing would ever stop her father's pipe from smoking. Nothing, not death, not any force of the living or spirit world, would ever still her father's heart. Rain cleansing her to the core, she was a spring of raw power and self-reliance, paddling against all adversity--their master completely. Her father's daughter. At times like that, when it rained, she entirely understood and shared her father's outlook on life.
Alexei Maxim Russell
with each measured step,we knowthis earth is only as solidas we are.
Sheniz Janmohamed
Toulouse then felt a cool touch on his right hand as something wound around his wrist. It was the Lucefate snake, slowly coiling around him, winding tightly, but not enough to leave more than a slight impression afterwards. Toulouse flinched at first, yet forced himself to remain still and calm. It was Nature’s first commandment to humans: remain still and calm until you understand, until you have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt all that was needed before acting.
Mary-Jean Harris
Then the immortal heart of the woods will beat against ours and its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own forever, so that no matter where we go or how widely we wander we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship.
L.M. Montgomery
The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings
Michael Ondaatje
There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons, And I want to go back—and I will.
Robert Service
But no matter how ferociously pitiable is the dried up graveyard, the sand and barrenness and the sluggish little stream have their own persistent individual damnation. The world is at least so constructed that its treasures may be damned each in a different manner and degree.
Mary MacLane
Even evolutionary explanations of the traditional division of labor by sex do not imply that it is unchangeable, “natural” in the sense of good, or something that should be forced on individual women or men who don’t want it.
Steven Pinker
(U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.
Northrop Frye
Winters are a desolate time where all senses are wiped away, and here in Canada, this is especially true. All smells are sucked clean from the air, leaving only a harsh, icy crispness. Colours are stripped away, leaving a stark white landscape, a sky which stays black at night and gray in the day, a world of only three shades. Stay outside too long, and your hands will get so cold that they’ll go numb and turn red, like the claws of a lobster. During a whiteout, even sight itself is reduced to nothingness.
Rebecca McNutt
Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. That means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an “ape legacy” that humans are doomed to live by.
Steven Pinker
Think of the billions of trillions of snowflakes, and the billions of trillions of hydrogen and oxygen molecules in every single one of them. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, who wrote the laws for the wind and the rain, the snow and the dew? I’ve tried to work it out, but it makes my head spin.
Alan Bradley
This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids sand. One hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. the only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours.
Douglas Coupland
People don't have dominion over Nature. it's gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now the same thing. The future and whatever happens to you after you die - it's all melted together. Death isn't the escape hatch the way it used to be.
Douglas Coupland
The hawk turned slowly and flexed his great wings to maintain his height. In this cold wind, he flew merely to see and to travel. Gone was the exhilaration of fast-rising summer air carrying him so high into the sky's blue vacuum that the pond became a silver speck and the great southern lake dazzled him with a glaring slash of reflected sun.
Franklin Russell
Across the valley, a waterfall stumbles down. In a month or two the really hard rains will come down for eighteen hours a day and that waterfall will once again become tough as a glacier and wash away the road. But now it looks as delicate as the path of a white butterfly in a long-exposed photograph.
Michael Ondaatje
Later that afternoon, the girls sat on the porch, bored and worried. It was good that they didn't find any dead bats, but why didn't they? Was Tyler right - did the bats fly higher when it was windier? Was it because they could avoid the turbine easier when it was spinning faster? That didn't make sense.
Pamela McDowell
...the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to immerse himself in swamps for the positive vibrations; at the other end is Benjamin Franklin, who didn't like Nature. [p.91]
Margaret Atwood
It was early autumn, then, before the snow began to fly. –(There’s an expression for you, born in the country, born from the imaginations of men and their feeling for the right word, the only word, to mirror clearly what they see! Those with few words must know how to use them.) Men who have seen it, who have watched it day by day outside their cabin window coming down from the sky, like the visible remorse of an ageing year; who have watched it bead upon the ears of the horses they rode, muffle the sound of hoofs on the trail, lie upon spruce boughs and over grass – cover, as if forever, the landscape in which they moved, round off the mountains, blanket the ice in the rivers – for them the snow flies. The snow doesn’t fall. It may ride the wind. It may descend slowly, in utter quiet, from the grey and laden clouds, so that you can hear the flakes touching lightly on the wide white waste, as they come to rest at the end of their flight. Flight – that’s the word. They beat in the air like wings, as if reluctant ever to touch the ground. I have observed them coming down, on a very cold day, near its end when the sky above me was still blue, in flakes great and wide as the palm of my hand. They were like immense moths winging down in the twilight, making the silence about me visible.
Howard O'Hagan
Daffy bent down suddenly, and picked a small startled white flower. "Anemone," he said, handing it over; he made her repeat the word until she had it right. "Find me a silk to match that.
Emma Donoghue
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
Little Joe was still behind him. Eli could feel it. He wanted to look back, but he couldn’t. The tears were too close. If he were Fancy, he’d turn around and kick and buck and moo and do just about anything to keep his calf near. But Eli wasn’t Fancy; he was a farmer.
Sandra Neil Wallace
Milkers don’t spend half as long with their mothers." Eli spread his chore coat over Little Joe. "Not more than a few weeks. Sometimes one day. Maybe not even ... If you were a peeper, it’d be even worse. They don’t even get to see their mamas. They’re still jelly beans when they’re left alone to hatch.
Sandra Neil Wallace
The mountains are intimations of transcendence, which he is now free to pursue, and the walking writes messages in every cell of his body, telling him that he is not locked inside a cement box, nor in a water drum, but is moving forward.
Michael D. O'Brien
For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.
Northrop Frye
The crow flew closer, as if to hear its praises.
Emma Donoghue
Everyone, no matter what their cultural background, has a right to discover the sacred in nature; to heal and be redeemed spiritually by nature; and to revere the ancestors. We are all haunted and saved by our memories.
Martha Brooks
Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited.
Yann Martel