Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 4

When his wife died, for a while it was the end of the world, because part of him had died with her. As the long, slow recovery proceeded, he had gratefully and guiltily accepted the return of equilibrium. But he had not paid attention to a parallel phenomenon: his reversion to what he had been before his marriage. Though changed by whatever he had learned during their years together, and by whatever healing had taken place, he had fallen back into the old patterns of withdrawal. Nursing the dreadful wound of her absence, he had failed to notice the subtler void opening up within himself.
Michael D. O'Brien
Friends disappear or they are powerless. This is what misfortune meansan acid test of friendship.I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Anne Carson
Although you can not hear my thoughts, Sam, I imagine I’m talking to you. Prayers to the brother who abandoned me. The day after you left Labrador, my honey started flowing. Is my body weeping for your loss?
Barry Webster
With Pollution, emotion is irrelevant, it is not their nature,” Mearth sighed, making a face as if she were talking to an ignorant small child. “I didn’t create them, humans created the Pollution. Cheryl Nobel, Alecto Steele, Albert Sanders, Olivia Campbell, all my pretty little Representations, there aren’t many of them left these days but they’re still very dangerous! They’re here to tell society all about its mistakes! You don’t understand the world of Representations.
Rebecca McNutt
You’re innocent until proven guilty,” Mandy exclaimed, unable to hide her gleeful smile. She missed the way people used to have normal conversations, used to be more caring for each other than themselves, back in the Seventies and Eighties. These days, she realized, neighbors kept to themselves, their kids kept to themselves, nobody talked to each other anymore. They went to work, went shopping and shut themselves up at home in front of glowing computer screens and cellphones… but maybe the nostalgic, better times in her life would stay buried, maybe the world would never be what it was. In the 21st century music was bad, movies were bad, society was failing and there were very few intelligent people left who missed the way things used to be… maybe though, Mandy could change things. Thinking back to the old home movies in her basement, she recalled what Alecto had told her. “We wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed.” The 1960’s and 1970’s were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was the popular film type, when music had lyrics that made you think, when movies had powerful meanings instead of bad comedy and when people would just walk to a friend’s house for the afternoon instead of texting in bed all day. She missed soda fountains and department stores and non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags, she wished cellphones, bad pop music and LED lights didn’t exist… she hated how everything had a diagnosis or pill now, how people who didn’t fit in with modern, lazy society were just prescribed medications without a second thought… she hated how old, reliable cars were replaced with cheap hybrid vehicles… she hated how everything could be done online, so that people could just ignore each other… the world was becoming much more convenient, but at the same time, less human, and her teenage life was considered nostalgic history now.Hanging her head low, avoiding the slightly confused stare of the cab driver through the rear view mirror, she started crying uncontrollably, her tears soaking the collar of her coat as the sun blared through the windows in a warm light.
Rebecca McNutt
Repression. Her therapist, Dr. Solomon, loved the word. He'd say it slowly, letting it roll off his tongue. Sometimes he'd add a chin stroke for good measure. He always looked pleased when he did this, like he'd discovered the Caramilk secret or something.
Jo Ann Yhard
. . . the sole aim of Okinawa Karate is to teach A person to handle violence and violent individuals; whether it is tactile, mental or spiritual
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
. . . most martial artists want to know how A technique is done, A seasoned Sensei will demonstrate why
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
I guess if there’s one thing I can say about the 21st century, it’s that the 21st century is all flash and no substance… everything is digital, nothing but files of invisible electronic data on computers and mindless zombies on their cellular phones… it’s sad how because of the digital age, society is ultimately doomed. Nothing in the digital age is real anymore, and you know, they say celluloid film and ray tube televisions and maybe even paper might become obsolete in this century? …What’s most annoying is that nobody cares, they’ve just learned to accept the digital age and get addicted to it… none of them are ever going to step up and say to the world, “you’re all a bunch of sheep!” and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen… they’re all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they’ve got these days… it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again.
Rebecca McNutt
Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.
Rebecca McNutt
Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on… places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills… a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future.
Rebecca McNutt
We make, see, and love films, not digitals. To convert all of our movies, home videos, theaters, photographs and television to digital would be like telling a painter to throw away his brushes and canvas for an I-Pad. Celluloid isn't just nostalgic, it's an art form and, like it or not, it's superior to digital. It lasts much longer, it provides grain and brighter colors, and it takes more effort so that it produces something wonderful. With the inferior binary codes, pixels and untested shelf-life of digital files, plus the fact that these days anyone with a digital camera, even a two-year-old, can make a video and pollute the world with self-photography and cat pictures, film has a lot more integrity and worth than digital.
Rebecca McNutt
LED lighting has its place: cold, detached, hollow places like office buildings, factories, fast food chains and public schools - places full of humans but no human emotions. LED lighting really belongs in the apathy of the digital age, where science and technology rules over friendship, love and freedom. Incandescent light bulbs have a warm yellow-orange glow like the glow of a nice fireplace, where friends and family might sit and talk together or where children might open Christmas presents, a glow that can project celluloid films and bring back old memories, a glow that can light the text of a paperback novel. Something that beautiful, with that much power, could never last very long in a time as depressing and uncertain as the 21st century.
Rebecca McNutt
Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn’t care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn’t just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life’s best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes.
Rebecca McNutt
True creativity is inherently destructive, and truly creative individuals always, without exception, seek to destroy the mediums they work within.
Douglas Haddow
Beautiful publishers say beautiful things and then We're sorry, but no... and then more beautiful things. It's a shit sandwich with branston pickle and melted gouda.I read it out loud to the kids. I stick it to the fridge with the others. Some writers do that because it turns their crank to have a Wall of Publishers Who Passed And Will Someday Regret It. I don't. Each one is, really and truly, a gift. We look at them and the boys and I talk about rejection, all kinds of it. Creative, karmic, romantic. Nothing works out until something does.
Kate Inglis
Over time, this growing tendency of like marrying like will only reinforce clustering and geographic sorting along class lines, giving the emerging map of social, economic, and cultural segregation even greater permanence.
Richard Florida
Emotion,' she told him, 'is not a reliable guide for our words and actions.''There you are wrong,' he said. 'Deep, true emotion is our surest guide. We make our greatest mistake when we allow our heads to rules ours hearts.''Emotion is our human weakness.,' she said, 'reason our strength.''And love,' he said, 'is our destiny.
Mary Balogh
The world is your canvas and your teacher.Take a day to reflect, measure and adjust on your goals; progress is essential to continued success.
Bob Proctor
Just understand that the good that you want is already here. All you have to do is get in harmony with it. And you do that through your own thinking.
Bob Proctor
All top salespeople have a highly evolved will all top leaders have a highly evolved will you see it's the will that gives us the ability to focus
Bob Proctor
I might be the hazardous waste site that polluted it, but Cape Breton Island is still my home.
Rebecca McNutt
Root yourself in this earthand it will root itself in you.
Sheniz Janmohamed
Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.
Gabor Maté
The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless constraints of gravity, and fly off a tall building. “I’m freeeee… SPLAT!”.
Stefan Molyneux
When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.
William Gibson
We live in a world where we give our pounds to those who have too much and our pennies to those who have too little
Dean Griffiths
Mark, trying his best to distance himself from the cruel and pathetic 21st century, hadn’t listened to the news reports, not even when the dark green jeeps and helicopters showed up in town, men dressed in identical uniforms, just like in school, always standing with stony faces, setting up shelters and warning signals and food storage boxes. And as the public service announcements and racist propaganda bloomed onto the screens in every classroom, Mark’s only observation was that the United States still had such a long way to go. When times were dire, they resorted to using inaccurate stereotypes and ignorance as a weapon, with an impressionable society always willing to believe without further question.
Rebecca McNutt
Real Martial Arts is Mathematics, Physics, Poetry; Meditation in Action
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
While I may not always feel joy, God asks me to give thanks in all things because He knows that the feeling of joy begins in the action of thanksgiving.
Ann Voskamp
photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself…
Rebecca McNutt
You self-proclaimed "MILF" hunters have it all wrong -- we aren't the prey, YOU are. You are but a Service Male - a SMILF!
Delaine Moore
One is that if women’s sexuality in Africa wasn’t under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren’t subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behavior generally, then you would have a disease in Africa called AIDS. But you wouldn’t have a pandemic.
Stephen Lewis
It was worth it," Faye says after school while she walks me to my car. "It's not fair that you take all the shit for this while the guys get to walk around like nothing happened. They're just as much to blame.""I'm the one who started it," I say, kicking a beer cap across the parking lot with my shoe. "If I hadn't started it, nothing would have happened."Don't let them off the hook so easily," Faye snaps. "They were coming to you. It takes two to have sex. So don't defend them.
Laurie Elizabeth Flynn
Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don’t know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.
Eckhart Tolle
True Martial Arts is universal, simple and practical. Anything else is too complex to be used in combat.
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
Of course you have passions and talents. Of course you have some purpose in the world. Your emotions are guiding you towards it. Each time you discover something that you like or something that you hate, you discover yourself. Everyone can do this. If you didn't like some things more than others, you'd be living in a sewer eating grass. More often than not, it's those things you think are too weird, too personal, or too imperfect that you must share. The world does not await your perfection. It awaits your courage and your honesty. Let yourself be seen.
Vironika Tugaleva
I am not sure I can.""Become sure," said the cat, his eyes flashing green in the firelight. "Once you leap on a boar's back, you can't sheath your claws.
Erin Bow
…Maybe I’ll be watching super-8 home videos,” Alecto told her, smiling bleakly. “I love my super-8 camera, it’s an Eastman Kodak one… Kodak stopped manufacturing them, the world went digital and now Kodak has stopped making Kodachrome film and all kinds of traditional film products… it’s sad.” “Well, uh… well, have fun watching your home movies then,” Mandy finished, but she didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
Rebecca McNutt
How promising today's generation is. They can whip out their cellular phones like sheep, instantly take a million digital photos of their cat and then just delete them. But I'd like to see these kids try to artfully use a traditional film camera or make a super 8 home movie. Traditional film takes integrity, nostalgia, effort, patience and imagination - things that the 21st century has very little of. Everything these days, even a superior medium like film photography with an extensively vivid history and an iconic meaning, is becoming disposable in this age.
Rebecca McNutt
Oh, I’m Chrissy Mackenzie, I’m from Vancouver but I came here to study environmental journalism,” the girl exclaimed with way too much enthusiasm. “You got any advice?”“Search me,” Mandy muttered, spooning another ice cube from the empty glass on the table in front of her. “I like pollution, I write in favor of it, and environmental journalism most often implies that it’s in favor of all that “go green” hippie crap.” “Oh, well….” Chrissy seemed taken aback, offended, and Mandy sighed a fourth time. “Damn it, I’m really sorry,” she apologized, smiling dismally at the aspiring writer. “It’s just been a really lousy day for me and I wasn’t really thinking. My advice? Find your own cause to represent, not one thrown out into society by a ton of environmentalist dopes. Find something new, something you think could be improved, and work from there.” Chrissy smiled with a look of total ecstasy as if the words of some nobody woman were important. Mandy momentarily noticed the groups of laughing, drunk, giggling people, all acting childish… and for a moment she wished she could be them.
Rebecca McNutt
Perhaps we should rejoice that people’s emotions aren’t designed for the good of the group. Often the best way to benefit one’s group is to displace, subjugate, or annihilate the group next door. Ants in a colony are closely related, and each is a paragon of unselfishness. That’s why ants are one of the few kinds of animal that wage war and take slaves. When human leaders have manipulated or coerced people into submerging their interests into the group’s, the outcomes are some of the history’s worst atrocities.
Steven Pinker
People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines.
Rebecca McNutt
Mom hadn't met Ramon; her advocacy was more arm's length - petitions, the website, letter writing, meetings with politicians. Her friend Hanna had formed a close friendship with Ramon though, visiting him as often as she could. Hanna told me that Ramon's greatest regret was that he wouldn't get to see his daughter grow up.And Jeremy's dad, who had that opportunity, was just throwing it away.It made me furious, and I couldn't let it go.
Robin Stevenson
Our external results are merely a reflection of our internal reality.
Joan Posivy
There were fat cats and skinny cats. The long-tailed and the bobbed. The daring young leapers, and the old windowsill sleepers. Balls of waddling fluff, smooth-coated prowlers, and hairless ones that looked fragile and wise. The tiger-striped, the ring-tailed, and the ones with matching coloured socks and mittens. There were tabbies and calicos. Manx and Persians. Siamese and Bombay. Ragdolls and Birmans. Maine Coons and Russian Blues. There were Snowshoes and Somalis, Tonkinese and Turkish, and many, many more. Brown and beige and orange and grey and black and white and silver cats, each with gleaming eyes of emerald, or sapphire, or amber. A rainbow of precious stones.
Brooke Burgess
[We let] the universality of fantasy, of once upon a time, allow escapist fiction to be more than just that - to also bring us home.
Guy Gavriel Kay
A karate practitioner should possess two things : wicked hands, and Buddha's heart
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
Sometimes,I doubt the courage My bones are made ofAnd then,A breath finds her way inAnd her way outThe half-way-almost-full moonSmiles down;My heart sighsAnd quietly whispers:I remember.
Bryonie Wise
Patience and Forgiveness are at the heart of A warrior's success, they help engender necessary intervals of space and time to evaluate difficult encounters.
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
I’m scared of him. I’m disgusted by the vile monster he becomes, this beast he lets out. But I still love him. I’d still do anything for him. I can’t just turn off my heart. I want to, I do, but I can’t. I love him with everything I have and I hate myself for it. Because it’s wrong to love him, I know. It’s so wrong.
Karina Halle
Better than money and fame, teaching martial arts to your children; giving them your time and confidence, is the best inheritance
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after… you know… after the funeral we haven’t had the money for any of your weird little games and I was hoping you’d be more mature now that Jud’s gone,” her father had disappointedly added. “How much’d that cake cost you?”“It’s paid for,” Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. “I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy’s last year and I… it was my birthday, dad!”“You can’t even be normal about this one thing, can you?” her father had complained.Mandy hadn’t cried, she’d only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. “…I’m normal.
Rebecca McNutt
Her latest client is Professor Desmond Curnin, a university professor who teaches library sciences to large groups of students. He’s quick to pay on-time, quick to never fall behind. He’s a brown-haired man with an unkempt beard and thick-framed hipster glasses. He slides a leather briefcase stuffed with dollar bills into the open window of Geraldine’s car. “Your fly’s unzipped,” Geraldine points out, disgusted. “Who gave you a license to sell hot dogs, buddy?
Rebecca McNutt
It’s time to ask why [the United States] is the only country in the world where we permit our children to be saddled with tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars of debt before they begin to earn a penny.
F.H. Buckley
. . in Old Karate, you learned you Art through pain. You learned quickly that your techniques had to be fast or powerful or both. If you did not embrace pain and it's lessons adequately, you simply did not survive
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
If you are for gun control, then you are not against guns, because the guns will be needed to disarm people. So it’s not that you are anti-gun. You’ll need the police’s guns to take away other people’s guns. So you’re very pro-gun; you just believe that only the Government (which is, of course, so reliable, honest, moral and virtuous…) should be allowed to have guns. There is no such thing as gun control. There is only centralizing gun ownership in the hands of a small political elite and their minions.
Stefan Molyneux
When you establish peace, when you etablish love, when you establish kindness here [inside], you cannot act any other way to the outside world.
Mimi Ikonn
English is so hierarchical. In Cree, we don't have animate-inanimate comparisons between things. Animals have souls that are equal to ours. Rocks have souls, trees have souls. Trees are 'who,' not 'what.
Tomson Highway
When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.
Eckhart Tolle