Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 169

I knew nothing. Now I've seen what a raw deal lots of other people like Krystal get. And it's not their fault. Not their choice. People don't get to choose what body they're put into. Like, people get born into bodies in the middle of a genocide war in Darfur, and they don't get to worry about how tall they are or whether they'll ever be able to row. They're too busy worrying about how they're going to stay alive for another day.
Maureen Garvie
Darkness entered into, darkness realized, is the point of departure for all profound expressions of Christian hope. 'Meaningless darkness' becomes 'revelatory darkness' when it is confronted by the courage of a thoughtfulness and hope that is born of faith's quest for truth.
Douglas John Hall
Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.
Rivka Galchen
There are many different stories to tell. It's never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is always believed, no matter what. The seeds from which the garden has grown.
Helen Humphreys
The truth will form and fall apart again.
Sarah Slean
Is this the truth we knew, and then forgot?Maybe the lies are all that we've gotBut aren't they beautiful?
Sarah Slean
Our willingness to write truthfully brings the story to life.
Alan Watt
We can be seduced...by powerful political groups that promise more wealth and lower taxes. Those with power can use clever, psychological tricks and play upon our weaknesses and brokenness in order to attract us to their way of thinking. We can be manipulated into illusion.
Jean Vanier
If your motives aren't clean, money itself becomes evil. But When we don't have money enough evil, the world tells us we're losers. So what determines our place in society is not how much kindness is in our hearts but how much evil is in our wallet.
Todd McFarlane
Elizabeth Bachinsky, Darren Bifford, Jason Camelot, Rachel Cyr, Tara Flanagan, Lilly Fiorentino, John Goldbach, David McGimpsey, Evan Munday, Sachiko Murakami, Ian Orti, Marisa Grizenko, Christina Palassio, Mike Spry, Darren Wershler.
Jon Paul Fiorentino
People wandered in for books and conversation. They brought their stories to her, some bound, and some known by heart. She recognized some of the stories as real, and some as fiction. But she honored them all, though she didn't buy every one.
Louise Penny
One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.
William Osler
Curiosity is the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality.
James Cameron
It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.
Margaret Atwood
You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it--a demand for people to reach a finer place! ...Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you're digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you're not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you're wasting your day.
Douglas Coupland
Sometimes when you get older—and I'm not talking about you, I'm talking generally, because everyone ages differently—things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they're a part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they're not true—why, then you get offended.
Sara Gruen
If you want the answer—ask the question.
Lorii Myers
Listening to people espouse beliefs different from mine is informative, not threatening, because the only thing that can alter my worldview is a new and undeniable truth, and contrary to what Jack Nicholson says in 'A Few Good Men', "I CAN handle the truth.
Michael J. Fox
A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.
Saul Bellow
The truth is that judgment and fear will never stop, but they don't actually do anything.
Julien Smith
The truth was only another mask, even if it was the best fit, the closest to skin and all that lay beneath
Michelle Sagara West
Just beyond the ticket booth Father had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain. There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the curtain that we had to replace it regularly. Behind it was a mirror.
Yann Martel
Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can’t leak your hidden intentions if you don’t think they are your intentions. According to his theory of self-deception, the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that interact with other people.
Steven Pinker
Better the comfort of a lie than the absurdity of the truth.
Tanya Huff
What's even more messed up than funerals, is the way people treat you after the funeral. Like you're diseased or something.
Denise Jaden
Personal perception of perfection is like that. You see what you want to see. After awhile you just see what you need to.
Matthew Good
If we act like prey, they’ll act like predators
Alyxandra Harvey
Don't let the fear of losing them keep you from loving them.
Nicole Williams
I think most are too afraid to see the truth.
Morgan Rhodes
In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.
Eckhart Tolle
The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.
Mary Pickford
The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.
Margaret Atwood
No matter what you do, someone always knew you would.
Ami McKay
You will never be entirely comfortable. This is the truth behind the champion - he is always fighting something. To do otherwise is to settle.
Julien Smith
We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.
B.W. Powe
Gossip, as usual, was one-third right and two-thirds wrong.
L.M. Montgomery
Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality.
Robin S. Sharma
With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.
Sara Gruen
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.
Margaret Atwood
The present is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.
Madeleine Thien
Not a good book. It attempts to take a complex subject and make it assessable to the layman with cartoons, and in this effort it fails. Moreover, the authors often take biased stances, and while I agree with them for the most part it nonetheless detracts from any scholarly offerings in which they wish to partake.
Richard Appignanesi
The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.
Ian Hacking
Both [Quine and Feyerabend] want to revise a version of positivism. Quine started with the Vienna Circle, and Feyerabend with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics. Both the Circle and the school have been called children of Ernst Mach; if so, the philosophies of Feyerabend and Quine must be his grandchildren.
Ian Hacking
Water everywhere, falling in thundering cataracts, singular drops, and draping sheets. Kellhus paused next to one of the shining braziers, peered beneath the bronze visage that loomed orange and scowling over his father, watched him lean back into absolute shadow.“You came to the world,” unseen lips said, “and you saw that Men were like children.”Lines of radiance danced across the intervening waters.“It is their nature to believe as their fathers believed,” the darkness continued. “To desire as they desired … Men are like wax poured into moulds: their souls are cast by their circumstances. Why are no Fanim children born to Inrithi parents? Why are no Inrithi children born to Fanim parents? Because these truths are made, cast by the particularities of circumstance. Rear an infant among Fanim and he will become Fanim. Rear him among Inrithi and he will become Inrithi …“Split him in two, and he would murder himself.”Without warning, the face re-emerged, water-garbled, white save the black sockets beneath his brow. The action seemed random, as though his father merely changed posture to relieve some vagrant ache, but it was not. Everything, Kellhus knew, had been premeditated. For all the changes wrought by thirty years in the Wilderness, his father remained Dûnyain …Which meant that Kellhus stood on conditioned ground.“But as obvious as this is,” the blurred face continued, “it escapes them. Because they cannot see what comes before them, they assume nothing comes before them. Nothing. They are numb to the hammers of circumstance, blind to their conditioning. What is branded into them, they think freely chosen.So they thoughtlessly cleave to their intuitions, and curse those who dare question. They make ignorance their foundation. They confuse their narrow conditioning for absolute truth.”He raised a cloth, pressed it into the pits of his eyes. When he withdrew it, two rose-coloured stains marked the pale fabric. The face slipped back into the impenetrable black.“And yet part of them fears. For even unbelievers share the depth of their conviction. Everywhere, all about them, they see examples of their own self-deception … ‘Me!’ everyone cries. ‘I am chosen!’ How could they not fear when they so resemble children stamping their feet in the dust? So they encircle themselves with yea-sayers, and look to the horizon for confirmation, for some higher sign that they are as central to the world as they are to themselves.”He waved his hand out, brought his palm to his bare breast. “And they pay with the coin of their devotion.
R. Scott Bakker
We belittle what we cannot bear. We make figments out of fundamentals, all in the name of preserving our own peculiar fancies. The best way to secure one's own deception is to accuse others of deceit.
R. Scott Bakker
It is strange the way trauma deadens curiosity. To suffer cruelty in excess is to be delivered from care. The human heart sets aside its questions when the future is too capricious. This is the irony of tribulation.To know the world will never be so bad.
R. Scott Bakker
Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need — to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing him to play the knot as a result.
R. Scott Bakker
By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.These are worth it. These are what I have come for.
Margaret Atwood
When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.
David Cronenberg
All these years of thinking, ending up like this: In front of all this beauty, understanding nothing.
Bruce Cockburn
There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied.
John Fraser
Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying.
R. Scott Bakker
Here we find further argument for Gotagga’s supposition that the world is round. How else could all men stand higher than their brothers?
R. Scott Bakker
Men, Kellhus had once told her, were like coins: they had two sides. Where one side of them saw, the other side of them was seen, and though all men were both at once, men could only truly know the side of themselves that saw and the side of others that was seen—they could only truly know the inner half of themselves and the outer half of others.At first Esmenet thought this foolish. Was not the inner half the whole, what was only imperfectly apprehended by others? But Kellhus bid her to think of everything she’d witnessed in others. How many unwitting mistakes? How many flaws of character? Conceits couched in passing remarks. Fears posed as judgements …The shortcomings of men—their limits—were written in the eyes of those who watched them. And this was why everyone seemed so desperate to secure the good opinion of others—why everyone played the mummer. They knew without knowing that what they saw of themselves was only half of who they were. And they were desperate to be whole.The measure of wisdom, Kellhus had said, was found in the distance between these two selves.Only afterward had she thought of Kellhus in these terms. With a kind of surpriseless shock, she realized that not once—not once!—had she glimpsed shortcomings in his words or actions. And this, she understood, was why he seemed limitless, like the ground, which extended from the small circle about her feet to the great circle about the sky. He had become her horizon.For Kellhus, there was no distance between seeing and being seen. He alone was whole. And what was more, he somehow stood from without and saw from within. He made whole …
R. Scott Bakker
Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools.
R. Scott Bakker
So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.
R. Scott Bakker
Of course, supernatural acts are what miracles are all about. They are, after all, precisely those things that circumvent the laws of nature. A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about.
Lawrence M. Krauss
There isn't an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.
Jo Walton
Asshole Proximity Disorder
Stefan Molyneux
If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert
Peter Watts