Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 137

If you could know how happy I am, as Jesus' little spouse. No one....could I envy, because I am enjoying my complete happiness, even when I suffer something for my beloved Spouse.
Brian Kolodiejchuk
The burning zeal....that had led her to India had apparently vanished. At the same time....she clung steadfastly to the faith she professed, and without a drop of consolation, labored wholeheartedly in her daily service....of the poor.
Brian Kolodiejchuk
What mattered to her was that she loved God, whether or not He granted her the consolation and joy of His felt presence.
Brian Kolodiejchuk
To live in joy and fully manifest our true potential, we must let go of our desires and attachment to the past and the future and be excited about living in the unknown.
Mada Eliza Dalian
It’s not enough to hear or think about the truth, we must experience it for ourselves if we are to truly know it.
Mada Eliza Dalian
The smile that covered a "multitude of pains" was no hypocritical mask. She was trying to hide her sufferings - even from God! - so as not to make others, especially the poor, suffer because of them. When she promised to do "a little extra praying & smiling" for one of her friends, she was alluding to an acutely painful and costly sacrifice: to pray when prayer was so difficult and to smile when her interior pain was agonizing.
Brian Kolodiejchuk
There is so much deep contradiction in my soul. Such deep longing for God - so deep that it is painful - a suffering continual - and yet not wanted by God - repulsed - empty - no faith - no love - no zeal. Souls hold no attraction - Heaven means nothing - to me it looks like an empty place - the thought of it means nothing to me and yet this torturing longing for God. Pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything. For I am only His - so He has every right over me. I am perfectly happy to be nobody even to God. . . .Your devoted child in J.C.M. Teresa
Brian Kolodiejchuk
I hunger for filling in a world that is starved.
Ann Voskamp
But, someone, please give me—who is born again but still so much in need of being born anew—give me the details of how to live in the waiting cocoon before the forever begins?
Ann Voskamp
To commit herself to becoming "an apostle of Joy" when humanly speaking she might have felt at the brink of despair, was heroic indeed. She could do so because her joy was rooted in the certitude of the ultimate goodness of God's loving plan for her. And though her faith in this truth did not touch her soul with consolation, she ventured to meet the challenges of life with a smile. Her one lever was her blind trust in God.
Brian Kolodiejchuk
We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.
Margaret Atwood
Usually, we believe that our pain is a misfortune that needs to be fixed, but in fact, all pain (physical, mental, and emotional) is a necessary step towards becoming conscious.
Mada Eliza Dalian
With stillness comes the benediction of Peace.
Eckhart Tolle
Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.
Eckhart Tolle
I love the smell of old books,” Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs.
Rebecca McNutt
Cats and books are my universe. Both are infinitely fascinating and full of mystery.
Rai Aren
I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds--this was a comfort to me.
Alice Munro
Don’t you think it’s better to continue reading than to just close the book?
Rebecca McNutt
Her gaze wavered towards one of the books on the sales counter beside the register, a hardcover copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with many of the pages dog-eared and stained with coffee and tea. The store owner caught her looking at it and slid it across the counter towards her. “You ever read Hamlet?” he questioned.“I tried to when I was in high school,” said Mandy, picking up the book and flipping it over to read the back. “I mean, it’s expected that everyone should like Shakespeare’s books and plays, but I just….” her words faltered when she noticed him laughing to himself. “What’s so funny, Sir?” she added, slightly offended.“…Oh, I’m not laughing at you, just with you,” said the store owner. “Most people who say they love Shakespeare only pretend to love his work. You’re honest Ma’am, that’s all. You see, the reason you and so many others are put-off by reading Shakespeare is because reading his words on paper, and seeing his words in action, in a play as they were meant to be seen, are two separate things… and if you can find a way to relate his plays to yourself, you’ll enjoy them so much more because you’ll feel connected to them. Take Hamlet for example – Hamlet himself is grieving over a loss in his life, and everyone is telling him to move on but no matter how hard he tries to, in the end all he can do is to get even with the ones who betrayed him.”“…Wow, when you put it that way… sure, I think I’ll buy a copy just to try reading, why not?” Mandy replied with a smile.
Rebecca McNutt
I hold a theory that, sooner or later, if a man but live long enough, certain books destined for his peculiar delight will find him, however obscure they or he may be.
Vincent Starrett
Why is it these days that so many people hate reading? Some people won't even touch a newspaper or magazine. It isn't television that kills reading, or cinema or radio, or even those accursed little things known as video games. People used to read all the time, but when the century shifted subtly, somewhere along the way, people forgot how to imagine. When did it happen? At what point? Who or what is to blame? Maybe it's just because the world has become so cold and scientific and shallow in recent years.
Rebecca McNutt
Growing up in the digital age, I'm expected to embrace all forms of modern technology with blissful ignorance. Books were always one of few escapes from this, because reading a book means not having to look at another damned glowing screen - which is why, no matter how "convenient" or "enhanced" digital enthusiasts claim that Ebooks are, I'll never see them as real books. They're just files of binary data, and while they might be considered books by a large amount of people, Ebooks have lost the human quality that real books have. You can argue that this is pretentious or stupid or nostalgic, but ultimately what will you pass down to your children and grandchildren? A broken old Kindle device with the same files that millions of other people have, or the dog-eared paperbacks that you fell in love with and wrote your name in and got signed by the author and flipped through in the bookstore and kept with you for years, like an old friend?
Rebecca McNutt
You can learn from a glance at anyone's library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.
Alan Bradley
I loved books. Loved reading. It not only gave me an escape from my own world, but opened a door into other worlds. It allowed me, at the beginning of my marriage, to suffer with some grace. As long as I had another world to go to, what did I care about how small and strange and terrifying my own life had gotten?
Molly O'Keefe
I wasn't discriminating in my reading, and I'm still not. I read then primarily to be entertained, as I do now. And I'm not saying that apologetically: I feel that if you remove the initial gut response from reading — the delight or excitement or simply the enjoyment of being told a story — and try to concentrate on the meaning or the shape of the "message" first, you might as well give up, it's too much like all work and no play.
Margaret Atwood
You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft it's acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teachers. Sometimes they're alive, sometimes dead.As a vocation, it involves the laying on of hands. You receive your vocation and in your turn you must pass it on. Perhaps you will do this only through your work, perhaps in other ways. Either way, you're part of a community, the community of writers, the community of storytellers that stretches back through time to the beginning of human society.As for the particular society to which you yourself belong -- sometimes you'll feel you're speaking for it, sometimes -- when it's taken an unjust form -- against it, or for that other community, the community of the oppressed, the exploited, the voiceless. Either way, the pressures on you will be intense; in other countries, perhaps fatal. But even here, speak 'for women,' or for any other group that is feeling the boot, and there will be many at hand, both for and against, to tell you to shut up, or to say what they want you to say, or to say it a different way. Or to save them. The billboard awaits you, but if you succumb to its temptations you'll end up two-dimensional."Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.
Margaret Atwood
You know how there are words that never really—they are never really quite right. You can't quite trust them. Use them. You know. Without p
Emma Richler
What did they want from it? Lechery, smut, confirmation of their worst suspicions. But perhaps some of them wanted, despite themselves, to be seduced. Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.
Margaret Atwood
If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.
Margaret Atwood
I think this story-writing business is the foolishest yet," scoffed Marilla. "You'll get a pack of nonsense into your heads and waste time that should be put to your lessons. Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.
L.M. Montgomery
To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken.
Yann Martel
However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is completed is not, Whitman argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a superficial level, grasping certain meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven't yet grasped. That is why - as Whitman believed, rewriting and re-editing his poems over and over again - no reading can ever be definitive.
Alberto Manguel
They say no one reads anymore, but I find that's not the case. Prisoners read. I guess they're not given much access to computers. A felicitous injustice for me. The nicest reader letters I've received – also the only reader letters I've received– have come from prisoners. Maybe we're all prisoners? In our lives, our habits, our relationships?
Rivka Galchen
I couldn't convince her that if I had a book with me, I wasn't lonely.
Alyxandra Harvey
When Benjamin Franklin, the famous inventor and publisher, was serving as the American ambassador to France, he often impressed French intellectual with the wisdom of his remarks. At one dinner, the question was raised, "What human condition deserves the most pity?" Each of the guests responded, but the answer that is still remembered is Benjamin Franklins's: "A lonesome man on a rainy day who does not know how to read.
Paul Kropp
Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)
Steven Heighton
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
Alberto Manguel
Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction.
Raymond A. Mar
Reading is awesome and flexible and fits around chores and earning money and building the future and whatever else I’m doing that day. My attitude towards reading is entirely Epicurean—reading is pleasure and I pursue it purely because I like it.
Jo Walton
All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.
Alberto Manguel
But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
Alberto Manguel
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
Margaret Atwood
Tucking my nose into a book makes me completely oblivious to my surroundings. I would have made a terrible spy in the army--the first person to hand me a novel would have been able to shoot my head clean off without me noticing.
Alyxandra Harvey
It is not true that 'we have only one life to live'; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
S.I. Hayakawa
I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.
Margaret Atwood
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
Saul Bellow
Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.
Tom Rachman
A successful actor is praised for never giving up his dreams to become someone else for a living but to dream to be an unmasked artist is a mortal sin in a consumerist society. Artists don't consume; they create things that can’t be consumed with riches. You consume art by seeing, by listening, by feeling, never by buying.
Bruce Crown
We are all of lifewho stepped from the seatrading weightless journeys of the currentsWe are all of lifewho build and tear down and build againto find gold and silverto find scars that weep and bleedto step from the seato stay with the sea
Tamara Rendell
He printed business cards celebrating his shift. They read, 'Ars gratia pecuniae.' Translated, it meant, 'Art for money's sake.
Kliph Nesteroff
The contemporary art world is what Tom Wolfe would call a "statusphere." It's structured around nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affliction, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attribution such as the size of one's art collection.
Sarah Thornton
Although the art world is frequently characterised as a classless scene where artists from lower-msddle-class backgrounds drink champagne with high-priced hedge-fund managers, scholarly curators, fashion designers and other "creatives," you'd be mistaken if you thought the world was egalitarian or democratic. Art is about experimenting with ideas, but it is also about excellence and exclusion. In a society where everyone is looking for a little distinction, it's an intoxicating combination.
Sarah Thornton
We learn so that we may succeed, and that goes for anything in life, including the arts. It’s a falsity that the moment we earn money or wish to earn money for our creations that it ceases to become art.
Karina Halle
Nature is beautiful in all its chaos. However, a nature photograph is beautiful only in the absence of chaos.
Mike MacDonald
Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn’t remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt.
Emily St. John Mandel
The human being now simply can't close his elected garment about himself. Obligations to one's fellows perhaps prevent full buttoning by artists.
Saul Bellow
The notion of "cause and effect" is sometimes useful in real life, and it can even be interesting in art, but I'm more interested in "cause and cause" or "effect and effect" or "and and and".
kevin mcpherson eckhoff
The function of the artist is to disturb. His duty is to arouse the sleeper, to shake the complacent pillars of the world. He reminds the world of its dark ancestry, and shows the world its present and points the way to its new birth. He is at once the product and preceptor of his times.
Norman Bethune
There is so much in the world for us if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it ourselves- so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful for.
L.M. Montgomery
I wish I had a dollar for every time someone said, "Me? No, I'm not creative". I would be gazillionaire. The thing is, that's not really them talking, it's their jerkface inner critic. Okay, so maybe you haven't made anything in a very long time, but that doesn't mean you're not creative. What it means is that, somewhere along the way, you became really good at saying "Me? No, I'm not creative".
Danielle Krysa