Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 145

Everybody has. It wouldn't do for us to have all our dreams fulfilled. We would be as good as dead if we had nothing left to dream about.
L.M. Montgomery
Today you live, child. Tomorrow, you dream.
Lawrence Hill
We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them. We wanted to hatch out of clean, smooth, beautiful eggs, as they did, back when we were young and agile and innocent of cause and effect, we did not want the mess of being born, and so we crammed the birds into our gullets, feathers and all, but it was no use, we couldn’t sing, not effortlessly as they do, we can’t fly, not without smoke and metal, and as for the eggs we don’t stand a chance. We’re mired in gravity, we’re earthbound. We’re ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.
Margaret Atwood
In my dreams of this city I am always lost.
Margaret Atwood
Listen to the trees talking in their sleep,' she whispered, as he lifted her to the ground. 'What nice dreams they must have!
L.M. Montgomery
I grew up with an ambition and determination without which I would have been a good deal happier. I thought a lot and developed the faraway look of a dreamer, for it was always the distant heights that fascinated me and drew me to them in spirit. I was not sure what could be accomplished with tenacity and little else, but the target was set high and each rebuff only saw me more determined to see at least one major dream to its fulfillment.
Earl Denman
Did she ever feel nostalgia for any of her girlhood dreams? But life was made up of a succession of dreams, some few to be realized, most to be set aside as time went on, one or two to persist for a lifetime. It was knowing when to abandon a dream, perhaps, that mattered and distinguished the successful people in life from the sad, embittered persons who never moved on from the first of life's great disappointments. Or from the airy dreamers who never really lived life at all.
Mary Balogh
The world is a giant eye, staring back at the stars. When it tires, it closes its lids--just as I am doing now--and gives way to dreams, which is why the night is so much more mysterious than the day.
Sean Stewart
But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.
Margaret Atwood
She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she could not immediately begin dreaming again. And she discovered that, while solitude with dreams is glorious, solitude without them has few charms.
L.M. Montgomery
Fer in our dreams we find ourselves. Who we were. Who we are. Who we can become. Sleep. Dream.
Moira Young
I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.
Jim Carrey
In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves.
Douglas Coupland
Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.
Michael Ondaatje
She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
Michael Ondaatje
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
Margaret Atwood
You may tire of reality but you never tire of dreams.
L.M. Montgomery
I will not live in a city where dead bodies lie abandoned in the streets, and you will not tell the world I do.
Steven Galloway
A dead war horse is the single most expensive corpse you’ll ever see.
Christian Cameron
The predominant cancer metaphor is war. We fight cancer, usually valiantly. We attack tumors and try to annihilate them and bring out our arsenals to do that, and so on. It's us against cancer. This metaphor has come in for its share of criticism within the ethical, psychological and even oncological disciplines. A main concern is that when someone dies of cancer, the message that remains is that that person just hasn't fought hard enough, was not a brave enough soldier against the ultimate foe, did not really want to win.The cancer-is-war metaphor does not seem to allow space for the idea that in actual war, some soldiers die heroically for the larger good, no matter which side wins. War is death. In the cancer war, if you die, you've lost and cancer has won. The dead are responsible not just for getting cancer, but also for failing to defeat it.
Alanna Mitchell
No, blowing up cities doesn't work, not in the long term. You've got to find something that the people in charge aren't willing to give up. A price they aren't willing to pay.Which leads us to Talis's first rule for stopping wars: make it personal.
Erin Bow
Space and time blurred and the void filled with explosions and shards and narrow misses and voices in the Force: his pilots, laughing and swearing and howling to their deaths. He laughed and swore and howled along with them, the silence unbearable.Kill, kill, and kill again, slaughter the starfighters, slaughter the Tuskens, every loss is the same loss, every pain springs from one source. Save Kothlis, save Coruscant, save Padmé. Save them all.
Karen Miller
perhaps, all these years, historians had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral because a spiral was so difficult to describe. was war, then, the big solution after all? war the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenalin, the solvent of ennui, angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? war itself a massive sexual act. -war, finally, the controller, the trimmer & excisor; the justifier of fertility?" --the Wanting Seed/Burgess
Tony Burgess
Girls with poison necklacesto save themselves from torture.Just as women wear amuletswhich hold their rolled up fortunestranscribed on ola leaf.
Michael Ondaatje
A young body, a young heart, and endless courage. That last part is the most important. Don’t let anyone tell you any differently. Why do you think we used to send so many kids your age off to war?
Karina Halle
It was a war, and in a war there are always casualties. Never winners, but always plenty of casualties.
Mili Fay
I am a Warrior of Virtue, Nenya, the Water Warrior. Ardan is safe at last. That is all that matters. That is all that will ever matter...
Mili Fay
Soldiers of capitalism are the fathers of dissent.
kevin mcpherson eckhoff
It was a war, and in a war there are always casualties. Never winners, but always plenty of casualties."-- Nenya, The Water Warrior
Mili Fay
But to a Vietnamese peasant whose home means a lifetime of back-breaking labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.
Morley Safer
Let him who thinks war is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking honour and praise and valour and love of country … Let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realize how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all youth and joy and life into a fetid heap of hideous putrescence! Who is there who has known and seen who can say that victory is worth the death of even one of these?
Wade Davis
Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?
Margaret Atwood
How did the war creep up? How did it gather itself together? What was it made from? What secrets, lies, betrayals? What loves and hatreds? What sums of money, what metals?
Margaret Atwood
North Korean troops gathering… inside North Korea.That is unheard of.""They were massing very close to the border.""North Korea is the size of Ohio. It would be geographically challenging for them to gather very far from the border.
Sylvain Neuvel
Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification.
Michael Ignatieff
I might wish our Windthorn men were less obsessed with war, but I have to admit it keeps them busy.
Kate Sherwood
As a child, I thought that war and peace were opposites. Yet I lived in peace when Vietnam was in flames and I didn't experience war until Vietnam had laid down its weapons. I believe that war and peace are actually friends, who mock us.
Kim Thúy
Battle is gruesome, but it is vigorous, alive. The aftermath is the worst of it: adrenaline fades, quiet sweeps in, and there’s nothing to distract you from the mess of bodies and disturbed earth.
Darrell Drake
In a war, you wield every weapon you have, including words. Especially words.
Fonda Lee
People afraid of outsiders are easily manipulated. The warrior caste, supposedly society's protectors, often become protection racketeers. In times of war or crisis, power is easily stolen from the many by the few on a promise of security. The more elusive or imaginary the foe, the better for manufacturing consent. The Inquisition did a roaring trade against the Devil.
Ronald Wright
During a famine, the father and stepmother of Hansel and Gretel abandon them in a forest so that they will starve to death. The children stumble upon an edible house inhabited by a witch, who imprisons Hansel and fattens him up in preparation for eating him. Fortunately Gretel shoves the witch into a fiery oven, and “the godless witch burned to death in a horrible way.” 41 • Cinderella’s stepsisters, when trying to squeeze into her slippers, take their mother’s advice and cut off a toe or heel to make them fit. Doves notice the blood, and after Cinderella marries the prince, they peck out the stepsisters’ eyes, punishing them “for their wickedness and malice with blindness for the rest of their lives.” Snow White arouses the jealousy of her stepmother, the queen, so the queen orders a hunter to take her into the forest, kill her, and bring back her lungs and liver for the queen to eat. When the queen realizes that Snow White has escaped, she makes three more attempts on her life, two by poison, one by asphyxiation. After the prince has revived her, the queen crashes their wedding, but “iron slippers had already been heated up for her over a fire of coals.... She had to put on the red-hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dropped to the ground dead.
Steven Pinker
Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers
Steven Pinker
Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.
Steven Pinker
It was a lesson the world had already taught me and was teaching me still. You don't know what's possible until you actually see it.
Amanda Lindhout
....in Bosnia, mass rape was a policy of the war, systematically carried out, implicating neighbors, paramilitaries, soldiers.
Ausma Zehanat Khan
We’ll stand before the piles of stones that used to be weapons, and we’ll build an altar.
Sarah Bessey
And what she understood-what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood-was that the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same-and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.
Omar El Akkad
Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.
Omar El Akkad
Hell, any game that gives its players guns is probably not the kind that'll ever really let you go free.
Jeanne Ryan
Sarat smiled at the thought. "You couldn't just let us kill ourselves in peace, could you?""Come now," said Yousef. "Everyone fights an American war.
Omar El Akkad
Everyone fights an American war.
Omar El Akkad
It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds.
Omar El Akkad
Labels such as ‘‘the culture wars,’’ ‘‘the science wars,’’ or ‘‘the Freud wars’’ are now widely used to refer to some of the disagreements thatplague contemporary intellectual life ... But I would like to register a gentle protest. Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable,more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are.
Ian Hacking
Part of waging war is knowing when you’re outgunned.
Robert Charles Wilson
It's going to happen soon, a nuclear war. Someday, somewhere, some jackass politician will get in over his head and push the button, and us? Society? We haven't really grasped the full reality of the situation. If a nuclear bomb were detonated, we'd all just be collateral damage. That's why it has to be prevented, because trust me when I say that nobody will be standing up for our rights or life when there's no one left to do so.
Rebecca McNutt
If not for a dumb beast's incomprehension at its own destruction beneaththe loving hands of two heartbroken children.
Steven Erikson
The psychological components of war have not gone away—dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception
Steven Pinker
We were going to get Ahmed back. And Rahim back. And Shazad. And Delila. And all the others who had been captured. And we were going to end this.
Alwyn Hamilton
That's the thing about war: it's never enough to disable the buildings, to blow holes into their middles; instead, they're hit over and over again, as if to pound them to dust, to disintegrate them, to remove them from the earth, to deny that families ever lived in them. But people did live there. And they needed to return, even though there was nothing left to return to except forbidding piles of broken concrete and cable wires sticking out of the heaps like markers of malevolence.
Izzeldin Abuelaish
History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit.
Thomas B. Costain