Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 29

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.
Malcolm Gladwell
...you are not what you seem - you're a Sylph - you leave and the air retains your image - you haunt me...
John Geddes
Urban survival rule 22: Never annoy an armed man.
Kelley Armstrong
As moonlight gently fills your room, your dreams begin to sprout, then bloom.
Wendy Tugwood
Divorce is a process, not an event. It takes months to unfold, a barrage of emotional ups and downs as denial is replaced by grief, grief by anger, and anger gradually eases into acceptance.
M. K. Tod
Who has a house for ten years and doesn't own a drill? - KerryA gay man who has the phone number of a really hot carpenter. - Malcolm
Jaime Samms
In ancient Greece, adolescence was a time when young men left their biological families to become the lovers of adult men. Sexuality was but one element of an affectional and educational relationship in which youths learned the ways of manhood
Barry D. Adam
It was knock or go home and die. Rase knocked. tThe door opened with such alacrity that Rase wondered whether Gabriel had been standing on the other side, drawn to the door by the same uncanny instinct that had inspired him to torment Rase. t"You said anytime," Rase said, before Gabriel could say anything. t"I did." Gabriel seemed unperturbed at having his employer show up at his door. He stepped back to let Rase in. tRase had been expecting something in keeping with the rest of the building. Instead, Gabriel's apartment was shabby but spotless. It was one main room with a niche for the kitchen and a tiny bathroom that Rase could see through a narrow door that stood ajar. He walked to the center of the room and found himself only feet from Gabriel's bed, a sizable bed with a heavy iron frame. That stopped him in his tracks, and he stood there, wondering what to do with himself. t"Beer?" Gabriel was so close that Rase could feel Gabriel's breath on his hair. t"This isn't a social call," Rase said, not even trying to keep his voice steady. t"Then why are your clothes still on?
Anah Crow
You really want to go out to dinner?" Gabriel shot Rase a skeptical look out of the corner of his eye. t"As opposed to what?" t"Getting on your knees and begging me to beat you." There was no inflection in Gabriel's voice, no heat, and no emotion at all. He wasn't even looking at Rase. t... "I don't want one more than the other," he answered, fully aware that he was being challenged. "They're not interchangeable. I want them both." tRase took a breath to calm the pounding in his chest and continued, even though Gabriel wouldn't look at him. "I want to go out to dinner with you, anywhere you want, on a date. And then I want to go back to your place or my place and I want you to beat me until I bleed.
Anah Crow
Art is a conversation we are all invited to and are all worthy to participate in. Yes, great works can be intimidating, but no one else in the world has what you have—your voice, your eyes, your feeling and perspective. Other people have written great books, but no one else will ever write YOUR book. It's worth writing. That is the belief that carries me through.
Rachel Hartman
Imagination must be allowed to run free in our subconscious mind and when ready, it reveals its ideals to us in our conscious state.
Lee Bice-Matheson
May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity— a virtuous woman. Anything, Devil, but that.
Mary MacLane
Why should there be some sort of virtue always attributed to a frank admission of vice?
Gordon R. Dickson
People who don't like cats always seem to think there is some peculiar virtue in not liking them.
L.M. Montgomery
You're perfectly safe. Emily is here to protect your virtue." "That's too bad.
Kady Cross
Gender roles suck," says Swift Fox.Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.
Margaret Atwood
As she began to speak she stood and started to wrap herself, expertly, creating a binding in minutes that held without a wrinkle until the show ended. Peggy made a connection between binding her breasts and wrapping her hands in boxing wraps; this was what one did before battle, to protect one's self (and it is the Self, absolutely, that binding protects for many butches).
S. Bear Bergman
You do not see deviantly gendered people walking around with Nalgene bottles, getting our sixty-four recommended ounces as we go through our days. I am sure that somewhere there is an argument to be made that the trans community as a whole is a little cranky because we could all use a nice big glass of water.
S. Bear Bergman
A sociocultural environment is not some cunningly contrived thing only exists in social psychology labs. Don't look now, but you're in one right this moment.
Cordelia Fine
Gender, not religion, is the opiate of the masses.
Erving Goffman
As has been long observed, men are people, but women are women.
Cordelia Fine
There are more locations than girl and boy, man and woman. Decamping from one does not have to mean climbing into another. There’s plenty of space in between, or beyond the bounds, or all along and across the plane or sphere or whatever of gender, and it is entirely okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, and so I shall be a boy.” But it must also be okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, so I shall set about changing what it means to be a girl,” and, yes, okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, and so I shan’t.
S. Bear Bergman
My conversations with people who are just beginning to understand and include transsexual and transgender people in their plans or programs lean heavily on this. For them, the very fact of a transsexual who is a real student at their school or client of their agency can be new and surprising. But for queers and transfolk, who have institutionalized an additional set of queerly normative genders, it can sometimes be difficult to hear that we, too, must expand. If butch daddies want to crochet, if twinkly ladyboys are sometimes tops in bed, if burly bears can do BDSM play as little girls, if femme fatales build bookcases in their spare time, these things, too, are not just good but great. They bring us, I believe, wonderful news: news that gendered options can continue to explode, that the chefs in the kitchen of gender are creating new and imaginative specials every day. That we, all of us, are the chefs. Hi. Have a whisk.
S. Bear Bergman
No doubt the female self and the male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But flexible, context-sensitive, and useful is not the same as “hardwired”.
Cordelia Fine
I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people felt that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra- I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it. But I didn't go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.
Alice Munro
So please, for the love of gender- go bloom. Or water someone else while they do.
S. Bear Bergman
Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day.The woman had to skewer the hole in the kitchen sink, when it was blocked up.The man went to the pub every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The other nights he mended his broken bicycle, did the pool coupons, and longed for money and power.The woman read love stories and longed for things to be different.The children fought and yelled and played and had scabs on their knees.In the end they all died.
Elizabeth Smart
Show me slowly what I onlyknow the limits ofDance me to the end of love
Leonard Cohen
I should have danced more when I had no fear of falling.
Kim Cormack
Women, as well as men, in all ages and in all places, have danced on the earth, danced the life dance, danced joy, danced grief, danced despair, and danced hope. Literally and metaphorically, by their very lives.
Margaret Laurence
Life is the dancer and you are the dance.
Eckhart Tolle
A costume party… great… a chance for the bimbos to whore themselves out with no penalty of conscience. I found myself excruciatingly curious as to what she was going as, a sailor? No. A pilot. That would be something
Bruce Crown
Conscience. Imagine being pursued by your own conscience….A mountain of conscience. Throwing a lengthening shadow. Growing. Darkening.
Louise Penny
Shakespeare: …the best way to peace is to have a still and quiet conscience. Or none at all, thought Gamache.
Louise Penny
Conscience unlike a beard does not grow overnight, you have it or you don't
Faisal Khosa
Don't mistake dramatics for a conscience.
Louise Penny
But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]
Michael Ondaatje
It was at that moment, that even though she'd thought it before, Finley realized that Emily was a bloody genius.
Kady Cross
As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking, undying bond of human fellowship—a thing that is earth-old.
Mary MacLane
From insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs 'limbs'; from bedraggled white petticoats: Kind Devil, deliver me.
Mary MacLane
I shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things because of that wretched, lonely childhood. There will always be a lacking, a wanting -- some dead branches that never grew leaves. It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy. It is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing. It is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it.
Mary MacLane
Sometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature -- something not of earth, nor yet of heaven, nor of hell. I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements, where every little door is closed -- every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will never be any rest, that my woman's-soul will go on asking long, long centuries after my woman's-body is laid in its grave.
Mary MacLane
An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth.
Mary MacLane
Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.
Stephen Vizinczey
I think MacGregor might be a genius. Anyone so oblivious to the horror of the human world must be.
Susan Juby
Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.
Margaret Atwood
Geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Claire Messud
If we humans are good at anything, it’s thinking we’ve got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance.
David Suzuki
The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
Margaret Atwood
Nature is inexhaustibly sustainable if we care for it. It is our universal responsibility to pass a healthy earth onto future generations.
Sylvia Dolson
The idea of unlimited growth... needs to be seriously questioned on at least two counts: the availability of basic resources and... the capacity of the environment to cope with the degree of interference implied. - E.F. Schumacher
Wayne Ellwood
There are some things in the world we can't change - gravity, entropy, the speed of light, and our biological nature that requires clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our health and well being. Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die. Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them. It makes no sense to elevate economics above the biosphere.
David Suzuki
The stranger smiled at her. "Humanity has found a cure to a disease they never new existed.
Jeyn Roberts
The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eating implies a natural biological relationship. This culture doesn't just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is an ecological serial killer, and it's long past time for us to recognize the pattern.
Aric McBay
In the Gaia theory air, water, and soil are major components of one central organism, planet Earth. What we typically think of as life - the plants and animals that inhabit the earth - has evolved merely to regulate the chemistry of the biosphere. Humans are insignificant participants, far less important to the life cycle than termites. Even the imbalance that we have created by adding massive quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere may be brought back to acceptable levels by other organisms functioning in their capacity to correct excesses.
David Easton
Do an overwhelming number of respected scientists believe that human actions are changing the Earth's climate? Yes. OK, that being the case, let's undermine that by finding and funding those few contrarians who believe otherwise. Promote their message widely and it will accumulate in the mental environment, just as toxic mercury accumulates in a biological ecosystem. Once enough of the toxin has been dispersed, the balance of public understanding will shift. Fund a low level campaign to suggest any threat to the car is an attack on personal freedoms. Create a "grassroots" group to defend the right to drive. Portray anticar activists as prudes who long for the days of the horse and buggy. Then sit back, watch the infotoxins spread - and get ready to sell bigger, better cars for years to come.
Kalle Lasn
I love it when people yell at me about the environment and then I tell 'em I'm burning 90% cleaner than them.
Neil Young
If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.
Ronald Wright
An apple a day might have kept the doctor away prior to the industrialization of food growing andpreparation. But, according to research compiled by the United States Drug Administration (USDA) today’s apple contains residue of eleven different neurotoxins—azinphos, methyl chloripyrifos, diazinon, dimethoate, ethion, omthoate, parathion, parathion methyl, phosalone, and phosmet — and the USDA was testing for only one category of chemicals known as organophosphate insecticides. That doesn’t sound too appetizing does it? The average apple is sprayed with pesticides seventeen times before it is harvested.
Michelle Schoffro Cook
We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyones arguing over where they're going to sit
David Suzuki