Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 14

I can't help thinking that caring possibly is the riskiest enterprise known to man. But how stop caring?
Charlotte Vale Allen
He wet a paper towel, and took my chin, lifting and wiping my
Kelley Armstrong
Slick pimps, bribing civic kingpins, distill gin in stills, spiking drinks with illicit pills which might bring bliss.
Christian Bök
Someone once told me a joke," he said. "I'd like to be a pacifist, but people keep getting in the way.' I made a decision to fight for my friend in prison. It was a deliberate decision. It isn't the only way-it's just something I decided.
Edeet Ravel
There are times, Kruppe murmurs, when celibacy born of sad deprivation becomes a boon, nay, a source of great relief.
Steven Erikson
With no fact as a referent, what is normative is purely a matter of preference.
Ravi Zacharias
And so, when she heard if Hare Krishnas, she didn't hear right. She heard "Hairless Christians", and that is what they were to her for many years. When I corrected her, I told her in fact she was not so wrong; that Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians in their devotion to God, are hat-wearing Muslims.
Yann Martel
People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
Saul Bellow
At that moment, he was meaner and madder than he’d ever been, but mainly at himself, which is the worst kind of mean and mad to be, because the only thing to do about it is to take it out on someone else.
Victoria Forester
If you cherish something enough", she told me, "it doesn't matter how old or worn or useless it's become; your caring for it immediately raises its value in somebody else's eyes. It's just like rehab- a body's got to believe in their own worth before anybody can start fixing them, but most people need someone to believe in them before they can start believing in themselves.
Charles de Lint
The "us versus them" mindset coupled with our social nature implies that we have an innate need to belong to clearly defined in-groups.
Gad Saad
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.
Malcolm Gladwell
We considered behaving, but it's against our nature.
O.R. Melling
Ty swung around. He was obviously fed up with Ben's negative attitude.
Lauren Brooke
Thomas Henri Huxley often preached tolerance, but in practice he could not wait to go after religion and religious people in the most scornful of terms.[Curb your enthusiasm,2016]
Michael Ruse
We may need to put down the book from time to time, but we should make sure not to let the computer become the new book. The universal medium, like the universal library, is a dream that does more harm than good.
Andrew Piper
The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers.
Naomi Klein
Take a glass of wine while reading, your feet on the back of your slave. This is the best combination of pleasures that is.
Danny Tyran
Reading is dreaming. Reading is entering a world of imagination shared between reader and author. Reading is getting beyond the words to the story or meaning underneath.
Paul Kropp
There is no ME without books; they’re everything I remember from childhood, from maturity … All that’s happened to me has been coloured, permanently, by my reading.
Spencer Gordon
That's how you have to read this book, you see. You wade through a few sentences, then stop and think about them, then wade through a few more.
Susanna Kearsley
I have been reading three books Dean lent me this week. One was like a rose garden--very pleasant, but just a little too sweet. And one was like a pine wood on a mountain--full of balsam and tang--I loved it, and yet it filled me with a sort of despair. It was written so beautifully--I can never write like that, I feel sure. And one--it was just like a pig-sty. Dean gave me that one by mistake.
L.M. Montgomery
Antonio-"Just in time, Pete. Five more minutes of reading this and she'd have been in a coma."Peter-"Are we such bad company that you'd rather hide out in here reading that old thing?
Kelley Armstrong
Twenty-three D," he said, as a boarding-pass spooled from a different slot. He pulled her passport out and handed it to her, along with her ticket and the boarding pass. "Gate fifty-two, blue concourse. Checking anything?""No.""Passengers who've cleared security may be subject to noninvasive DNA sampling," he said, the words all run together because he was only saying it because it was the law that he had to.She put her passport and ticket away in the special pocket inside her parka. She kept the boarding pass in her hand. She went looking for the blue concourse. She had to go downstairs to find it, and take one of those trains that was like an elevator that ran sideways. Half an hour later she was through security, looking at the seals they'd put on the zippers of her carry-on. They looked like rings of rubbery red candy. She hadn't expected them to do that; she'd thought she could find a pay-station in the departure lounge, link up, and give the club an update. They never sealed her carry-on when she went to Vancouver to stay with her uncle, but that wasn't really international, not since the Agreement.She was riding a rubber sidewalk toward Gate 52 when she saw the blue light flashing, up ahead. Soldiers there, and a little barricade. The soldiers were lining people up as they came off the sidewalk. They wore fatigues and didn't seem much older than the guys at her last school."Shit," she heard the woman in front of her say, a big-haired blond with obvious extensions woven in.
William Gibson
Sometimes children do not realize by how fragile a thread their security hangs. Perhaps it is as well they do not - most of them grow up before the thread can be broken.
Mary Balogh
Everyone’s running from something.
Peter Watts
Under every layer of pain, another layer of recovery lies in wait, the sweet, forever surprising truth of endurance.
Carrie Snyder
There's not enough said about winter runing. Running in the winter is like not giving up when the road gets hard. It's about willpower and perseverance and being faithful to your sport.
Vanessa Runs
If it's a nod from society you're looking for, run a marathon. But if it's a life-changing experience of personal strength and perseverance that you want, finish an ultra.
Vanessa Runs
I'd rather be the last runner who saw a cool thing that everyone else missed, than to be a speedy runner who had a miserable experience.
Vanessa Runs
But most of all I was inspired by the stirring examples of all the other runners. In some pictures they would seem like tiny dots in a mosaic, but each had a separate narrative starting a few months or a lifetime earlier and finishing that day in the New York City Marathon, the race with 37,000 stories.
Mark Sutcliffe
Everything. Everywhere. Every moment. That is the scope of God's call on our lives, and that is the dignity our lives enjoy.
John G. Stackhouse Jr.
Once upon a time, my government turned my city into a police state, kidnapped me, and tortured me. When I got free, I decided that the problem wasn’t the system, but who was running it. Bad guys had gotten into places of high office. We needed good apples. I worked my butt off to get people to vote for good apples. We had elections. We installed the kind of apples everyone agreed would be the kind of apples we could be proud of. They said good things. A few real dirtbags like Carrie Johnstone lost their jobs.tAnd then, well, the good apples turned out to act pretty much exactly like the bad apples. Oh, they had reasons. There were emergencies. Circumstances. It was all really regrettable. tBut there were always emergencies, weren’t there?
Cory Doctorow
I'd seriously contemplated a real collar - a sparkly green one - if only because I was sure it would offend his dignity.
Kelley Armstrong
There is plenty of dignity in just holding on
Steven Erikson
If you make a fool of yourself, you can do it with dignity, without taking your pants down. And if you do take your pants down, you can still do it with dignity.
William Shatner
Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body.
Yann Martel
Facing facts is definitely preferable to facing defeat.
Gordon R. Dickson
In order for a god to be all-knowing, he must know even the fact of his own omniscience. But can he do this? He may know the totality of facts constituting the world; call this Y. But in order to know that he has mastered Y, he must also know that 'There are no facts unknown to me' — and this is beyond Y.It seems impossible that a god (or anyone) could ever be sure that nothing exists beyond his ken. It makes no sense to imagine [a god] arriving at this limit, peering beyond it (at what?), and satisfying himself no further facts exist. But without this certainty he cannot be sure of his own omniscience, and so does not know everything.A theist might argue that his god has created all the facts in existence. But an omniscient god would have to be sure of even this — that he is the sole creator, and that there are no facts unknown to him. And how could he come to this knowledge?
Roland Puccetti
He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.
Anne Carson
One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not to be done at all.
Brian Tracy
There is, you will concede, a limit to the niceties a man is obliged to fulfill when his wife is dead and not yet cold.
Allan Dare Pearce
Jane, you are my confidante, my helpmate, my friend. My lover. You are everything the word wife means to me. In my heart, we are wed. In my soul, you are mine.
Charlotte Featherstone
there are NO rules, merely suggestions
Keri Smith
Don't be afraid to make an ass of yourself. I do it all the time, and look what I got." (Spoken at a graduation ceremony while holding aloft an honorary doctoral degree from McGill University)
William Shatner
There was five golden rules. My dad made me write them over and over until I knew them like I knew my own name...Number five: never have a fire in the daytime, 'cause people could see the smoke and come and get us.Number four: if I ever see anyone other than my dad, I run, and keep running.Number three: always say my prayers, so as God don't get mad at me and decide to come make me sick too.Numer two: never forget to pray for my momma, 'cause she was the best and prettiest lady God ever made.Number one: never, ever leave the woods.
Jeff Lemire
...legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice--that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can't treat one group differently from another.
Malcolm Gladwell
I'm not their hero, but that doesn't mean that I wasn't brave. I never walked the party line, but that doesn't mean that I was never afraid. I'm not your hero, but that doesn't mean we're not one and the same.
Sara Quin
Sometimes I have to pretend I feel brave before I actually do. Sometimes I never make it past the pretending part. But those days are getting fewer and further between.
Nicole Williams
All right, let's consider some history here. I see a number of girls are wearing pants. This used to be frowned upon. In 1938, Helen Hulick was jailed for wearing slacks -- put behind bars.Do you think society should have the right to jail or punish you for what you choose to wear?
Svetlana Chmakova
[T]he mothers who had sold their children felt empty and sad. They felt as if this act, done freely by themselves (no one had forced them, no one had threatened them) had not been performed willingly. They felt cheated as well, as if the price had been too low. Why hadn't they demanded more? And yet, the mothers told themselves, they'd had no choice.
Margaret Atwood
Synchronicities then can be said are the product of focused thought which appear as patterns repeating in time. These wheels of time or gears of life then, can only record synchronicites as they occur by consciously manifesting and observing the patterns of behaviour from which they were created.
L.J Vanier
Are all humans human? Or are some more human than others?
Roméo Dallaire
Surely you can see the failings of the system. Inequality, injustice, unfairness, and exploitation--
Allan Dare Pearce
Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder
Rohinton Mistry
What thumbsuckers we all are...when it comes to mothers.
Margaret Atwood
Mama stared at me not with sadness, but with pleading. She was thinner than I'd ever allowed myself to notice, looking more like a child than a woman. I wanted to believe she knew what was best for me. I wanted to believe she was like every other mother and that she loved me more than I loved her. I hoped, if I followed her wishes, I would finally make her happy.
Ami McKay
Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother things was merely cute may have been lethal.
Margaret Atwood
Some delightful inscriptions are found in second-hand books. One, the most famous of all, may be found in every bookshop in the nation, repeated in a thousand and one volumes with only a single change of phrase in each. It is this: '______, with love from Momma.
Vincent Starrett
Gilbert put his arm about them. 'Oh, you mothers!' he said. 'You mothers! God knew what He was about when He made you.
L.M. Montgomery