Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 141

People learn when they are ready to learn. Are you ready?
Lorii Myers
To desire to change one’s past means there is a desire to change oneself. To desire to change oneself, one must learn to change.
Lorii Myers
Not much in the world ends up being the same as it started out, unless of course it had a very short life cycle.
Lorii Myers
I've put out a lot of little roots these two years," Anne told the moon, "and when I'm pulled up they're going to hurt a great deal. But it's best to go, I think, and, as Marilla says, there's no good reason why I shouldn't. I must get out all my ambitions and dust them.
L.M. Montgomery
What you're missing is that the path itself changes you.
Julien Smith
My life will be what I make it," he told her. "That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make.
Mary Balogh
As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...
Margaret Atwood
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
Marshall McLuhan
Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.
Wade Davis
I’m not concerned about your comfort zone or readiness for change. I’m concerned about the kids who just entered Kindergarten.
Ian Jukes
The best change you can make is to hold up a mirror so that people can look into it and change themselves. That's the only way a person can be changed."By looking into yourself," Zia said. "Even if you have to look into a mirror that's outside yourself to do it.""And you know," Maida added. "That mirror can be a story you hear, or just someone else's eyes. Anything that reflects back so you can see yourself in it.
Charles de Lint
There is never only one, of anyone
Margaret Atwood
Just that maybe … maybe you don’t want to change the story, because you don’t know what a different ending holds.
Ann Voskamp
When you listen, it's amazing what you can learn. When you act on what you've learned, it's amazing what you can change.
Audrey McLaughlin
Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.
Rohinton Mistry
People told her she hadn't changed much, in a tone which hinted they were surprised and a little disappointed she hadn't.
L.M. Montgomery
I love this world," he added. "That is what rules my life. When I die, I want to have done all in my power to leave it in a better state than it was when I found it. At the same time I know that this can never be. The world has grown so complex that one voice can do little to alter it any longer. That doesn't stop me from doing what I can, but it makes the task hard. The successes are so small, the failures so large and many. It's like trying to stem a storm with one's bare hands.
Charles de Lint
You can change the world again, instead of protecting yourself from it.
Julien Smith
Oh", she thought, "how horrible it is that people have to grow up-and marry-and change!
L.M. Montgomery
Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation.
Ann Voskamp
Change is hardest at the beginning, messiest in the middle and best at the end.
Robin S. Sharma
See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
Eckhart Tolle
Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.
Eckhart Tolle
Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism.
Stefan Molyneux
Men never feel quite the same about a woman's body once they know it's done that thing: widened and torn to push out a baby's head.
Emma Donoghue
Women, he would say, are not Muses. Muses are Muses. To confuse one with the other is to mistake the Devouring Void for the Seminal Light. Earthly Women and the Muses are ancient, sworn enemies. The battlefield is the Creative Male. On the one side is the encampment of Discordia, of Diana, of Venus located in his Heart and in his Groin. On the other is the Bastion of Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania, in his Brain and in his Mind. The Muses are tolerant and understanding of border raids, skirmishes, and harassing maneuvers. Throughout the history of the Male Light, there have been few painters, few writers, who have not had a She Who Must Be Accommodated. For some it was their mothers. For many their wives, their mistresses, their girlfriends. For many it was their daughters, a favourite waitress, a stripper, a whore. To the Muses, they are all one. Mother, whore, wife, daughter, stripper, waitress, mistress, girlfriend.
Dave Sim
Who? Mr. Dalton has his hand firmly on Grace's elbow, as though she can't manoeuvre herself through the blockade of tables and chairs.She could fly right through you, thinks Jack.
Helen Humphreys
Women at the top are the ones chosen to be there by men and not eliminated by women, a dual filter that excludes most witches: those with brilliance and originality and those capable of disturbing the status quo.
Heather Marsh
i am watersoft enoughto offer lifetough enoughto drown it away
Rupi Kaur
We need an army of white-haired, wild-eyed radicals cutting a swath against the sexism that crosses our paths. It is a good antidote to the larger community’s apparent belief that older women are slightly dotty, grandmotherly, benign souls.
Shari Graydon
She had that kind of undeniable femininity that few women achieve, bogged down as we are by other things.
Kate Pullinger
Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the man will be bored or put off?
Alice Munro
To be a femme fatale you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb.
Alice Munro
There's a way of listening in the dark that's so intense for girls. You can feel the insides of your ears.
Elisabeth de Mariaffi
i am not a hotel room. i am homei am not the whiskey you wanti am the water you needdon't come here with expectationsand try to make a vacation out of me
Rupi Kaur
Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't do that again.
Margaret Atwood
Where there is society there is no need for charity.
Heather Marsh
REBECCA:If you sit long enough, maybe everything becomes clear. Maybe you can make sense of all the losses and find one thing you can hold on to. I'm sitting here thinking of everything that has passed, everyone that is gone, and hoping I can find her, my mother. Not because she is my first choice, but because she is my last choice and... my world has gone to shit.
Marie Clements
And why must it always be presumed that a woman's views are based on personal considerations?
Emma Donoghue
My self is a thing that I must now compose...as one composes a speech. What I must present is a 'made' thing. Not something born.
Margaret Atwood
To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out while he himself puts them on like a sock over a foot onto the stub of himself--his extra sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye which extrudes, expands, winces and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again. Bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way; this journey into a darkness that is composed of women--a woman--who can see in darkness while he himself strains blindly forward.
Margaret Atwood
A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive – and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.
Malcolm Gladwell
To the young woman I say, This is the moment in your life when he who is wooing you will be at his kindest. And if you do not see kindness in the man you are dating, beware! For the partnership you are looking for will be nourished and nurtured only on the basis of a love that is not arrogant or prideful, but kind.
Ravi Zacharias
Women empowerment begins at home!
Alex Haditaghi
Women were still strange and inscrutable creatures. Men didn’t understand them. And women didn’t understand themselves either. It was always a performance of some sort. Everywhere you went, it was like there was a spotlight shining down on your head. You were on a stage when you were on the trolley. You were being judged and judged and judged. Every minute of your performance was supposed to be incredible and outstanding and sexy.You were often only an ethical question away from being a prostitute.
Heather O'Neill
A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
Steven Pinker
Men go to the ballpark with an assumed knowledge and interest, whereas women need to constantly demonstrate how much they know and care.
Stacey May Fowles
I figured a woman can't be understood the way a man can. Women have purposes men can't even imagine.
Craig Davidson
I like driving cab. Receptionists, sales clerks, waitresses -- they all have to look pleasant all the time. I can snarl if I want. There ain't too many women who can do that. Maybe garment workers are allowed to snarl at their sewing machines. But women mostly have to look pleasant when they're fucking miserable, and smile when they're angry.
Helen Potrebenko
That was what stuck in the craws of all the good women of Deptford: Mrs Dempster had not been raped, as a decent woman would have been—no, she had yielded because a man wanted her. The subject was not one that could be freely discussed even among intimates, but it was understood without saying that if women began to yield for such reasons as that, marriage and society would not last long. Any man who spoke up for Mrs Dempster probably believed in Free Love. Certainly he associated sex with pleasure, and that put him in a class with filthy thinkers like Cece Athelstan.
Robertson Davies
But if a role model in her seventies isn't layered with contradictions - as we all come to be - then what good is she? Why bother to cut the silhouette of another's existence and place it against our own if it isn't as incongruous, ambiguous, inconsistent, and paradoxical as our own lives are?
Molly Peacock
According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?
Margaret Atwood
Subtle cues in your behavior will set the frame that you are a selective, high-value guy. She will pick up on this and gain interest. She expects that a guy with potential will be selective. Here are some standards worth considering: An attractive woman who takes care of herself A woman who is sociable and has friends A woman who has a real thirst for life A woman who has a great energy and a positive outlook A woman who is not a flake
Erik Von Markovik
But even now, especially now, it seems to me that women have a strength about them that men never had. And I wonder how did men always get portrayed in the movies and such as the strong ones? How did it come to be that women are made to look like the weak ones who need protectin'? Truth is, it's men who need the protectin'. Really they do. Women have the strong thing inside of them and the can get through anything. They just can. They're used to pain of child birthing - pain no man knows - and some women being battered around and not treated right through all the centuries and having to learn at a real young age how to stay alive on the inside when the outside is being hurt real bad. Most all women know that. But men. Those poor men. They just don't have the inside strength the women do. It's harder for men to feel pain.
Sarah Felix Burns
You really love me?" she asked wistfully."The devil!" he exclaimed, looking over his shoulder. "Did I forget to say it? The thing I came to say?
Mary Balogh
Women do amazing, creative, wonderful things.
Kate Jacobs
Just about all men need a woman in one way or another, unless they’re very strange indeed. Tormenting you refreshes him. And you shouldn’t underestimate the gratitude all men feel for women’s beauty. Men who truly don’t like flowers are very uncommon and men who don’t respond to a beautiful woman are even more uncommon. It’s not primarily sexual; it’s a lifting of the spirits beauty gives. He’ll be in to torment you, and tease you, and enrage you, but really to have a good, refreshing look at you.
Robertson Davies
I want to be more than a rose in my husband's lapel.
Margaret Trudeau
May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.
Mary MacLane
Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don't understand characters that aren't ourselves and we aren't willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It's cartoons we're making now. And that's a shame.
Paul Haggis