Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 138

cademics and intellectuals are culture vultures. In a gathering of today’s elite, it is perfectly acceptable to laugh that you barely passed Physics for Poets and Rocks for Jocks and have remained ignorant of science ever since, despite the obvious importance of scientific literacy to informed choices about personal health and public policy. But saying that you have never heard of James Joyce or that you tried listening to Mozart once but prefer Andrew Lloyd Webber is as shocking as blowing your nose on your sleeve or announcing that you employ children in your sweatshop, despite the obvious unimportance of your tastes in leisure-time activity to just about anything.
Steven Pinker
How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before
Madeleine Thien
To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities.
Jane Jacobs
I have made up my mind that I will never marry. I shall be wedded to my art.
L.M. Montgomery
We're not copying life, we're making a comment on it.
Richard Williams
The data on the economic utility of artists is really, really strong. Artists and entrepreneurs are the same people...and of course entrepreneurs are the people who provide all of the vision for the entire capitalist system. They're absolutely necessary.But conservatives tend to be so blind to art that they can't even see that the artists are the ones who drive the economy forward!
Jordan Peterson
The source of our art then is not in the achievements of other artists in other days and lands, although it has learned a great deal from these, our art is founded on a long and growing love and understanding of the North in an ever clearer experience of oneness with the informing spirit of the whole land and a strange brooding sense of Mother Nature fostering a new race and a new age... So the Canadian artist was drawn North.
Lawren Harris
After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.
Arthur Erickson
However my mother had once said, ‘When you go to art school, you’ll find everybody sitting around practicing how to do their signature'; and sure enough, there they were, some of them doing just that.
Richard Williams
He had a sense—honed by experience—that what he’d contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted. That, Martinius had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect. [p. 67]
Guy Gavriel Kay
Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some ..." Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal
Kate Taylor
I pastiche, I quote, I lie. Fake, forge, forage, fabricate, copy, borrow, transform, steal. I illusion. I’m a genuine deceiver, a shy sham artist.
Shawna Lemay
No man can roan or inhabit the Canadian North without it affecting him, and the artist, because of his constant habit of awareness and his discipline in expression, is perhaps more understanding of its moods and spirit than others are. He is thus better equipped to interpret it to others, and then, when her has become one with its spirit, to create living works in their own right, by using forms, colors, rhythms and moods, to make a harmonious home for the imaginative and spiritual meaning it has evoked in him.
Lawren Harris
Erik Satie died on July 1, 1925; his last words were 'Ah, the cows...
John Richardson
Art can only progress towards its own self-annihilation.
Richard Appignanesi
Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.
Yann Martel
I think that's what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.
Misha Glouberman
Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular.
Naomi Klein
Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts. We also came to realize that we in Canada cannot truly understand the great cultures of the past and of other peoples, until we ourselves commence our own creative life in the arts. Until we do so, we are looking at these from the outside.
Lawren Harris
If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing
Glenn Gould
Art isn't a product. It's an experience
Lori Lansens
Art is anything you can get away with.
Marshall McLuhan
Although the art world reveres the unconventional, it is rife with conformity. Artists make work that "looks like art" and behave in ways that enhance stereotypes. Curators pander to the expectations of their peers and their museum boards. Collectors run in herds to buy work by a handful of fashionable painters. Critics stick their finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing so as to "get it right". Originality is not always rewarded, but some people take real risks and innovate, which gives a raison d'être to the rest.
Sarah Thornton
Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday.
Rebecca McNutt
Art is a kind of mining," he said. "The artist a variety of prospector searching for the sparkling silver of meaning in the earth.
Jane Urquhart
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Marshall McLuhan
That's creativity in a nutshell. A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway.
Zoe Whittall
The urge is always with me to retouch yesterday's canvas with today's paintbrush and cover the things that fill me with regret..
Andrew Davidson
...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
Michael Ondaatje
The term bohemian has a bad reputation because it's allied to myriad clichés, but Parisians originally adopted the term, associated with nomadic Gypsies, to describe artists and writers who stayed up all night and ignored the pressures of the industrial world.
Sarah Thornton
When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
Margaret Atwood
i am a museum full of artbut you had your eyes shut
Rupi Kaur
If your heart is broken, make art with the pi
Shane L. Koyczan
The best leaders are well-rounded, able to draw on whatever skills suits the particular situation at hand. They are determined, insightful, shrewd, and, most important, able to command the attention of the people around them.
Bob Rae
Leadership is not a voice crying in the wilderness, aloof and apart. It requires an ability to command as well as to inspire, to learn in the process of collaboration and to build a team with a common purpose that can take action and execute the change they envision.
Bob Rae
Rapport is the link between meeting and communicating.
Nicholas Boothman
Leaderships about transforming lives and making a difference through innovation and purpose, grounded in values and integrity
Michael Harris
She turned back to the rest of us. "They've taken it all," she said. "They've taken every last good thing in the world."Then she swung the door wide. "Now go and show them your answer.
Sebastien de Castell
You can't lead if no one will follow.
Margaret Atwood
No true individual has existed yet, able to live, able to die. Only diseased, tragic, or dismal and ludicrous fools who sometimes hoped to achieve some ideal by fiat, by their great desire for it. But usually by bullying all mankind into believing them.
Saul Bellow
To liberate yourself from your own self-judgment is to liberate others from it as well. To love yourself is an act of love for the world.
Vironika Tugaleva
In the world of business, being slow is a losing move.
Shawn Casemore
A business that is not growing after all, is dying.
Shawn Casemore
Only when we face the impossible, and experience the unbearable, do we find out who we truly are.
Vironika Tugaleva
There is no greater suffering than constantly measuring yourself and coming up short, except perhaps the realization that your suffering is hurting others. But where do we learn these things? Because, really, they are learned. We don't come crying out of the womb because of our birth weight or because we have no money in this brand new world. We learn to measure and we learn to attach our self-worth to those measurements.These patterns we're stuck in aren't just painful for us, they're also distracting us. Every day, the gap between rich and poor grows while the people of developed societies do nothing, because we are too busy worrying about looking good. We're distracted, but not because we've chosen to be. Being distracted by our illusory inadequacy keeps us from changing the world. And believe me, we all have the power to change the world. If we only make the time. If we only free some head space.If you can't learn to love yourself for yourself (and how could you with such a paradoxical motivation?)... then do it for us. Do it for the world. We need you. We need your mind. We need your attention. We need your thoughts. Change your focus, and you will (not can, but will) change the world. You already matter. You just have to realize it for yourself.
Vironika Tugaleva
When you accept a leadership role, you take on extra responsibility for your actions toward others. If you shun someone, the effect will trickle down through those who value your opinion.
Kelley Armstrong
The more you've struggled, the more inspiring your story will be when you come out the other side. Do not give up. Today's struggle brings tomorrow's wisdom.
Vironika Tugaleva
Leading means running fast enough to keep ahead of your people
S.M. Stirling
I believe that the best leadership is loud authenticity. That is what the world needs now. We don’t need more plastic, Photoshopped perfection. I don’t want people to look at me and wish they could be me. I want people to be more accepting of their own failures, imperfections, and struggles because they are inspired by how I accept my own.
Vironika Tugaleva
We shall all respect the principle of each other and do nothing that would be regarded as an act oppression to any portion of the people
Alexander Mackenzie
Victim fall in love with excuses
Robin S. Sharma
The conservatives had started bringing demagoguery to the table on the [Afghan] war issue the previous fall [fall 2006]. Whenever opposition members criticized the war policy, assorted Tories accused them of being disloyal and of failing to support the troops....[Harper] was gaining the reputation of a leader who couldn't see a belt without wanting to hit below it.
Lawrence Martin
So if you see no one like you, no one who agrees, don't worry. There are actually hundreds of people like you, and they're waiting for a leader. That person is you.
Julien Smith
Most people don't care who's in charge as long as someone is.
Tanya Huff
Existence is where the soul goes to learn how to interpret itself again.
Duncan McNaughton
When we remove all emotion, all judgement, and all expectation there is only love left. Love is found in the stillness of the soul. Love is without action, without attachment or need. Love is the subtle energy that flows through all of creation. Love transcends your being into ascension. Love is the harmony and the music of the universe, love is all there is.
L.J Vanier
If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island.
Mordecai Richler
Those who live without a great fire in their soul live in darkness.
Michael R. Fletcher
I pulled the sheet off their faces. Their faces were black with coal dust and didn't look like anything was wrong with them except they were dirty. The both of them had smiles on their faces. I thought maybe one of them had told a joke just before they died and, pain and all, they both laughed and ended up with a smile. Probably not true but but it made me feel good to think about it like that, and when the Sister came in I asked her if I could clean their faces and she said, "no, certainly not!" but I said, "ah, c'mon, it's me brother n' father, I want to," and she looked at me and looked at me, and at last she said, "of course, of course, I'll get some soap and water."When the nun came back she helped me. Not doing it, but more like showing me how, and taking to me, saying things like "this is a very handsome man" and "you must have been proud of your brother" when I told her how Charlie Dave would fight for me, and "you're lucky you have another brother"; of course I was, but he was younger and might change, but she talked to me and made it all seem normal, the two of us standing over a dead face and cleaning the grit away. The only other thing I remember a nun ever saying to me was, "Mairead, you get to your seat, this minute!
Sheldon Currie
I wondered why I hadn't realized before that art was hard because you had to recreate not merely the scene but the way it soared into your soul and changed you.
Edeet Ravel