Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 2

Being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be.
Margaret Atwood
Do you know why we’re all happy here, monsieur? Because it’s the last house on the road.
Louise Penny
My book, Ambassador Book one: how to take on the world and win will help to illuminate many of the obstacles that we all must face in order to succeed. You are invited on a journey of personal discovery.
Ken Taylor
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.
William Gibson
A surrendered day is a good day.
Danielle Boonstra
The Ninysh might have resisted a bit harder. I don't mean to imply that they were cowards...," Maurizio said shrugging, clearly implying that the Ninysh were cowards.
Rachel Hartman
Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
Eckhart Tolle
Because, life's too short, my friends. Let's squeeze in as many laughs as we can get.
Neil Pasricha
And does he like blondes, as well?'Rob laughed. I had forgotten just how great a laugh he had. 'No, he prefers, dark haired women. You've nothing to fear from the Sentinel, Nicola.
Susanna Kearsley
The trouble with you people is that you don't laugh enough.
L.M. Montgomery
Of course,” the cabbie said, “you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’re going.
Emily St. John Mandel
God, how I hate the fact that I know this stuff. It only proves that it is possible to learn by osmosis.
Natalie Blitt
The biggest enemies we have to overcome on the road to success are not lack of ability and lack of opportunity but fears of failure and rejection and the doubts that they trigger.
Brian Tracy
He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish.
John Vaillant
The city had been built by people from innumerable elsewheres. It was a chaos of cultures ordered only by its long streets. It belonged to no one and never would, or maybe it was a million cities in one, unique to each of its inhabitants, belonging to whoever walked its streets.
André Alexis
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
Hugh MacLennan
I am what libraries and librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.
B. K. Sandwell
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
Marshall McLuhan
The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.
Robertson Davies
Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.
Saul Bellow
Fundamentally all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying about the brief flicker of time we have here and the frustrations that it creates.
Mordecai Richler
The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.
Ethel Wilson
The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance the farther there is to go and the more there is to say the less time there is to say it.
Gabrielle Roy
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
Saul Bellow
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.
Northrop Frye
I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months but you don't earn the fourth without it.
Mordecai Richler
When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human and he responds emotionally but at the same time there's this cold observer who cannot cry.
Brian Moore
If we try to envisage an 'average Canadian writer' we can see him living near a campus teaching at least part-time at university level mingling too much for his work's good with academics doing as much writing as he can for the CBC and always hoping for a Canada Council Fellowship.
George Woodcock
Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself- it is the occurring which is difficult.
Stephen Leacock
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
Northrop Frye
The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.
Saul Bellow
There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism in a sense to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses their meannesses to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat as it were without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction.
Saul Bellow
It only seems as if you are doing something when you're worrying.
L.M. Montgomery
Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
Change is legitimate and inevitable for our language is a mighty river picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there but growing ever wider and richer.
Robert MacNeil
A word after a word after a word is power.
Margaret Atwood
There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.
Northrop Frye
O wild dark flower of woman Deep rose of my desire An Eastern wizard made you Of earth and stars and fire.
C. G. D. Roberts
Women forgive injuries but never forget slights.
Thomas Haliburton
Women who set a low value on themselves make life hard for all women.
Nellie McClung
The cave-dweller's wife complained that he hadn't dragged her anywhere in months.
Laurence J. Peter
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult.
Charlotte Whitton
The more underdeveloped the country the more overdeveloped the women.
J. K. Galbraith
By nice women . . . you probably mean selfish women who have no more thought for the underprivileged overworked women than a pussycat in a sunny window for the starving kitten in the street. Now in that sense I am not a nice woman for I do care.
Nellie McClung
The economic dependence of women is perhaps the greatest injustice that has been done to us and has worked the greatest injury to the race.
Nellie McClung
Le raison avant la passion - Reason over passion.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau
It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
Robert Service
The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience the task of surviving prosperity.
Alan Gregg
Take up our quarrel with the foe! To you from failing hands we throw The torch be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep though poppies grow In Flanders' fields.
John McCrae
There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom.
Bonar Law
There is no such thing as inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom.
Bonar Law
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of U.S.A. - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
Marshall McLuhan
War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.
Northrop Frye
You can vitally influence your life from within by auto-suggestion. The first thing each morning and the last thing each night suggest to yourself specific ideas that you wish to embody in your character and personality. Address such suggestions to yourself silently or aloud until they are deeply impressed upon your mind.
Grenville Kleiser
It may be that those who do most dream most.
Stephen Leacock
Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation violence is the natural recourse.
Marshall McLuhan
Vice is as much a part of human nature as folly and pornography may be as necessary to vent vice as satire is to vent folly.
Mavor Moore
As a rule I am very careful to be shallow and conventional where depth and originality are wasted.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
A promise made is a debt unpaid.
Robert W. Service
The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.
Margaret Atwood