Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 33

In all its beautiful, tragic fragility, there was still life.
Sara Gruen
Criticism involves taking a position, Mr. Day. How long has it been since you took a considered position on anything important?
Allan Dare Pearce
In the West, of course, God has been dead for some time. What remains is religion as social belief, which is at best a moral code and at worst social etiquette.
John Ralston Saul
Constantly seek criticism. A well thought out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold.
Elon Musk
To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)
Steven Heighton
A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.
Northrop Frye
...Everyone struggles to guard their heart from breaking, when they should desire to have a heart that breaks...
John Geddes
Struggle strengthens the human bond and lightens the burden of the human condition.
Lorii Myers
i need someonewho knows struggleas well as i dosomeonewilling to hold my feet in their lapon days it is too difficult to standthe type of person who givesexactly what i needbefore i even know i need itthe type of lover who hears meeven when i do not speakis the type of understandingi demand- the type of lover i need
Rupi Kaur
But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.
Peter Watts
Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.
Peter Watts
The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school.
Paul Tough
He said, I won't have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that she'd fall on her face.She said, If we don't let her have one like all the other girls she'll feel singled out. It'll become an issue. She'll long for one and she'll long to turn into one. Repression breeds sublimation. You know that. He said, It's not just the pointy plastic tits, it's the wardrobes. The wardrobes and that stupid male doll, what's his name, the one with the underwear glued on.She said, Better to get it over with when she's young. He said, All right but don't let me see it.She came whizzing down the stairs, thrown like a dart. She was stark naked. Her hair had been chopped off, her head was turned back to front, she was missing some toes and she'd been tattooed all over her body with purple ink, in a scrollwork design. She hit the potted azalea, trembled there for a moment like a botched angel, and fell.He said, I guess we're safe.
Margaret Atwood
Why is it that every time a girl says a guy is bothering her, it's fluffed off with oh, he just likes you, as if that makes it okay?
Kelley Armstrong
There was something fundamentally embarrassing about being a young woman...[the] embarrassment of wanting to be more assured, more substantive, more whole, of moving to tap resources that simply weren't there.
Michelle Orange
Everyone loves a girl who can rise to a crisis.
Allan Dare Pearce
We were girls in plaid skirts, loud and obnoxious, driving with the windows down. Capable students, nailing honor roll every year, despite our reputation. We were good kissers, decent dancers, fast with our hands. Desperate and dangerous. A little loose, sure. But desirable. Everyone knew. We were the girls who thought we were nothing if not this: a force, a flame, a million nerve ends electric with appetite and not afraid.
Colleen Curran
I could tell he was becoming sulky, as boys and men do when they're caught bluffing. And I ignored him, as girls and women do when they catch them out.
Alan Bradley
Life was like that when you were fifteen and knobby-kneed and you only had a handful of choices. Your world was small and cruel and narrow-minded and breathtaking.
Colleen Curran
I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
Margaret Atwood
Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there's a whole world of of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of without making any effort at all. I don't have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, aim as well, make loud explosive noises, decode messages, die on cue. I don't have to think about whether I do these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans our of the Eaton's Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I've done it badly.
Margaret Atwood
My friends say I'm a fool to think that you're the one for me, I guess I'm just a sucker for love. (love love) 'Cause honsetly the truth is that you know I'm never leaving, 'cause your my angel sent from above. (bove bove) Me and you can do no wrong. My money is yours give you a lil more 'cause I love ya, love ya. With me girl is where you belong...-Love Me
Justin Bieber
World peace is really inner peace within each individual mind.
Vironika Tugaleva
God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.
Saul Bellow
one of the great virtues of Christianity, according to (John)Wesley, is the way it fills up our every waking hour. Both (N.T.) Wright and Wesley write that Christianity is not just about what God does for us but what God does in us.
John Meunier
All those years thinking I was saved and had said my yes to God, but was really living the no.
Ann Voskamp
Long, I am woman who speaks but one language, the language of the fall--discontentment and self-condemnation, the critical eye and the never satisfied.
Ann Voskamp
One may be "outside" the church, but one can never be "outside" of God's love.
Clark H. Pinnock
You know it’s a real salvation when Baptists use cold water.
Jared Brock
This man was once my salvation. Now, he will be my ruin.
K.A. Tucker
This is the love of God, an alchemy that can turn enemies into children.
Mark Buchanan
...God and your heart both whisper - incline your ear - don't just learn from your head...
John Geddes
...you betrayed me, but after all those years I discover, my tears have wiped the slate clean...
John Geddes
When you finally betray me, I hope you care enough to try to kill my yourself.
Drew Karpyshyn
He tells me he can't believe how bitter he has become, how sour, that all his life he had been one of the most fun, one of the happiest, one of the most joyous people anyone knew, and now he was like a crumpled piece of steel covered in rust. The way he describes himself, a 'crumpled piece of steel covered in rust,' I don't think I'll ever forget those precise words or his voice as he said them.
Jacob Wren
After more than a thousand years," he continued, "an enemy finally broke through. Not because of superior firepower. Not because the Manchus were better fighters or strategists. They weren't. The Manchus breached the Great Wall and took Beijing because someone opened a gate. From the inside. As simple as that. A general, a traitor, let them in and an empire fell.
Louise Penny
Love does not last forever, then?""He asked me the same thing this morning," she said. "No, it does not - not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But it does die and cannot be revived.
Mary Balogh
No man of honor avoided what needed to be done, simply because it might not proceed in his favor.
Claire Delacroix
The strongest soldier cannot balance long upon the blade that does divide his honor and his heart, and whatever way he falls, the cut will kill him.
Susanna Kearsley
If keeping your word costs you the one thing you love the most, then what was it even worth keeping in the first place?
Heather McKenzie
Honor is a fool's prize. Glory is of no use to the dead.
Drew Karpyshyn
Even she hair itself rough and wiry; long black knotty locks springing from she scalp and corkscrewing all the way down she back... The only thing soft about Tan-Tan is she big molasses-brown eyes that could look on you, and your heart would beat time...
Nalo Hopkinson
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the lifelong race.
Robert W. Service
Canadian official multiculturalism has developed through the 1970s and '80s, and has become in the '90s a major part of Canadian political discourse in Canada rather than in the United States, which is also a multi-ethnic country, may be due to the lack of an assimilationist discourse so pervasive in the U.S. The melting pot thesis has not been popular in Canada, where the notion of a social and cultural mosaic has had a greater influence among liberal critics. This mosaic approach has not been compensated with an integrative politics of antiracism or of class struggle which is sensitive to the racialization involved in Canadian class formation. The organized labour movement in Canada has repeatedly displayed anti-immigrant sentiments. For any inspiration for an antiracist theorization and practice of class struggle Canadians have looked to the United States or the Caribbean.
Himani Bannerji
Abinia,” he said, pointing toward the chickens, “you look at those birds. Some of them be brown, some of them be white and black. Do you think when they little chicks, those mamas and papas care about that?
Kathleen Grissom
You don't have to be white to be white, you just have to be rich.
Christian Lander
brown life is an unbroken bearing of the weight and hollow of the active absence of brown life.
Vivek Shraya
Jennings is too tough and honest a writer to let anyone off her moral hook, even her hero.
Maureen Jennings
Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible.
Andrew Davidson
Snow crunched under the feet of three cloaked figures – a queen, her lady, and a gravedigger – as they hurried along a moonlit path in Windsor Castle's lower ward. The gravedigger pushed a cart that held a slab of marble, his pick and shovel, and some straw. When the trio reached the steps of St. George's Chapel, Queen Mary stopped. She turned her head, pushing aside the fur of her hood, and a gust of wind needled her with crystallized snow. She looked back at her attendants. Was she wrong to trust them with this night's work?
Barbara Kyle
Isabel Valverde was coming home. The brief, terrible letter from her brother had brought her across five thousand miles of ocean, from the New World to the Old, and during the long voyage she thought she had prepared herself for the worst. But now that London lay just beyond the next bend of the River Thames, she dreaded what awaited her. The not knowing – that was the hardest. Would she find her mother still a prisoner awaiting execution? Horrifying though that was, Isabel could at least hope to see her one last time. Or had her mother already been hanged?
Barbara Kyle
Fenella Doorn watched the unfamiliar wreck of a ship ghosting into her bay. Crippled by cannon fire, she thought. What else could do such damage? The foremast was blown away, as well as half the mainmast where a jury rig clung to the jagged stump, and shot holes tattered the sails on the mizzen. And yet, to Fenella’s experienced eye the vessel had an air of defiance. Demi-cannons hulked in the shadowed gun ports. This ship was a fighter, battered but not beaten. With fight still in her, was she friend or foe?
Barbara Kyle
The night of the fireworks changed the course of many lives in England, though no one suspected the dark future as hundreds of courtiers stared, faces upturned in delight, at the starbursts of crimson, green, and gold that lit up the terraces, gardens, and pleasure grounds of Rosethorn House, the country home of Richard, Baron Thornleigh. That night, no one was more proud to belong to the baron’s family than his eighteen-year-old ward, Justine Thornleigh; she had no idea that she would soon cause a deadly division in the family and ignite a struggle between two queens. Yet she was already, innocently, on a divergent path, for as Lord and Lady Thornleigh and their multitude of guests watched the dazzle of fireworks honoring the spring visit of Queen Elizabeth, Justine was hurrying away from the public gaiety. Someone had asked to meet her in private.
Barbara Kyle
They would never forget the war. The world wouldn’t let them, and neither would history.
Lee Strauss
Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.”Patricia Briggs.
Demetra Angelis Foustanellas
Once a man is truly dead and carried pale and cold across the Styx--once Old Bones has put an arm about his shoulders and walked him through the Gate into Darkness--might Science yet summon him back?
Ian Weir
I do not need to understand words to know he is disappointed I am not a boy. Some things need no translation. And I know, because my body remembers without benefit of words, that men who do not welcome girl-babies will not treasure me as I grow to woman - though he call me princess just because the Guru told him to.I have come so far, I have borne so much pain and emptiness!But men have not yet changed.
Shauna Singh Baldwin
I turn away from the smell of death, pressing my lavender scented handkerchief as tight as I can against my nose.
Meghan Masterson
Anyone young, famous and beautiful who dies young is forever frozen in time and fascinating to all of us.
Deb Stratas
You'll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you'll never stop climbing.
Robertson Davies