Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 43

Isn't it the task of the Holy Spirit to introduce some madness and intoxication into the world? Why this propensity for balance and safety? Don't we all long for one moment of raw risk, one moment of divine madness?
Ron Rolheiser
Safety was one thing, but what he really wanted was to be electrified, to be wounded, to be cast into the wilderness, to be released, to be exalted, and most especially to be surrounded by the drowning noise and ebullience and casual presence of friends calling out his name, demanding his presence.
Carol Shields
Freedom without structure is its own slavery.
David Brooks
I stand in the dark, start to unbutton. Then I hear something inside my body. I've broken, something has cracked, that must be it. Noise is coming up, coming out, of the broken place, in my face. Without warning: I wasn't thinking about here or there or anywhere. If I let the noise get out into the air it will be laughter, too loud, too much of it, someone is bound to hear.
Margaret Atwood
I am blessed. I can bless.
Ann Voskamp
Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.
Margaret Atwood
I’m jealous – not of their money to spend, but jealous that, for them, going home is a simple matter of turning down the correct lane.
Amber Dawn
Why would a white caribou come down to Beaver River, where the woodland herd lives? Why would she leave the Arctic tundra, where the light blazes incandescent, to haunt these shadows? Why would any caribou leave her herd to walk, solitary, thousands of miles? The herd is comfort. The herd is a fabric you can't cut or tear, passing over the land. If you could see the herd from the sky, if you were a falcon or a king eider, it would appear like softly floating gauze over the face of the snow, no more substantial than a cloud. "We are soft," the herd whispers. "We have no top teeth. We do not tear flesh. We do not tear at any part of life. We are gentleness itself. Why would any of us break from the herd? Break, apart, separate, these are hard words. The only reason any of us would become one, and not part of the herd, is if she were lost.
Kathleen Winter
You weren't lost. You were exploring. There's a difference.
Louise Penny
A sense of desolation settled within me: a cold, slimy stone lodged under my lungs. There was nothing happy about the woods, I thought, especially at night.
Craig Davidson
Mind you, Thunder Bay has a lot of outskirts. It's actually two cities melded together, so in a sense it has twice as many outskirts as other places. It's understandable that we got lost....
Paul Quarrington
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.
William Gibson
What sticks with me now is that this man said he needed to get to a hospital. He probably needed to reach his destination more than anyone else on the bus, yet he lacked the capacity to ride without getting kicked off. Maybe he reached the hospital eventually, and maybe he was connected with social workers and housing specialists who will help him transform his life. But I fear he got on another bus, and another bus after that, without going anywhere at all.
Susan Nielsen
Schizophrenia. Always a bitch.
Allan Dare Pearce
Advances in biological knowledge have highlighted the potential chronicity of effects of childhood maltreatment, demonstrating particular life challenges in managing emotions, forming and maintaining healthy relationships, healthy coping, and holding a positive outlook of oneself.
Christine Wekerle
Etta, it could be everything, it could be nothing, what you’re making up. You shouldn’t let that bother you.
Emma Hooper
The main reason why clinicians may not diagnose personality disorders is that they think that doing so supports therapeutic pessimism. Recent research has shown this is not true; most patients get better, either with time or with treatment, that the prognosis is actually better than in many patients with severe mood and anxiety disorders.
Joel Paris
What is actually observed in so-called 'biplar children'? If you read the research reports carefully, they describe broad and persistent emotional dysregulation. Although these children have mood swings, they do not develop manic or hypomanic episodes. They are moody, irritable, oppositional and likely to misbehave—like all children with disruptive behavior disorders. Their grandiose thinking usually consists of little beyond boastfulness. No evidence from genetics, neurobiology, follow-up studies or treatment response shows that this syndrome has anything in common with classical bipolarity.
Joel Paris
The baby was warm against my chest. I knew I was broken too. I wasn't like other people. I was scared and weird and anxious and sad lots of the time, and I didn't know why. My parents thought I was abnormal, I was pretty sure. They said I wasn't, but you don't get sent to a therapist if you're normal.Sometimes we really aren't supposed to be the way we are. It's not good for us. And people don't like it. You've got to change. You've got to try harder and do deep breathing and maybe one day take pills and learn tricks so you can pretend to be more like other people. Normal people. But maybe Vanessa was right, and all those other people were broken too in their own ways. Maybe we all spent too much time pretending we weren't.
Kenneth Oppel
The measure of a man, or a woman for that matter, is not so much how much they have done, but what they have overcome to do what they have done. My favorite poets have said:"Do not go gentle into that good night!"-Dylan Thomas"...fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance ran..."-Rudyard Kipling
MR Leif N Gregersen II
In talking with people that have experienced it, I learned that PTSD is something that a person in a position of authority sometimes thinks they’re not supposed to have. They don’t always have an avenue to personally address it or even discuss it.
Stana Katic
People can't listen until they're ready. I sure couldn't. I was, like, deaf to everyone except the thoughts. They were the boss of me.
Teresa Toten
Schizo. It didn't matter how many times Dr. Gill compared it to a disease or physical disability, it wasn't the same thing. It just wasn't. I had schizophrenia. If I saw two guys on the sidewalk, one in a wheelchair and one talking talking to himself, which would I rush to open a door for, and which would I cross the road to avoid?
Kelley Armstrong
The shrinks call it Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. I call it hell. The demons are waiting in each corner, ready to drag me back to the battlefield.- Puncture Wounds (2014)
James Coyne
I hear a siren and, if we weren’t already in a hospital, I would have assumed they were coming for nearly everyone in this room.
Michael F. Stewart
Everything in life, except her kids, made her impatient. She had tried to do a million things. She'd wanted to be a documentary filmmaker and then a painter and then a tiny-ceramic-figure maker. None of it panned out. She'd be full of enthusiasm at first, full of big ideas and energy and drive, but it would all gradually evaporate and disappear. She could never maintain the momentum or the concentration or the confidence she needed to get anything done.
Miriam Toews
Picture a place called the Karma Kafe and it'll save me the bother of describing it. There was nothing in it you wouldn't expect, from the Buddha flowerpots to the wallpaper decorated with symbols that probably said, "If you bought this just because it looked pretty, may Buddha piss in your coffee, you culturally ignorant moron.
Kelley Armstrong
He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.
Rachel Hartman
I've heard that the best way to help poor people is to make sure you don't become one of them
Robin S. Sharma
Sarcasm is the language of people whose emotions are dying.
Barry Webster
Of course. I died today, and now I'm going to fight aliens with a light saber. Maybe after that we can look for mermaids. Or unicorns.""No," he says. "Just aliens."Was that the barest hint of humour in his tone?
Eve Silver
Resilience, thy name is Devine.
Lori Lansens
…believing sarcasm and rude remarks kept the monsters at bay. They didn’t.
Louise Penny
Any boy who'd love a sailboat-patterned, swimsuited sausage who tames rabid foxes would be wonderful. And impossible.
Fanny Britt
What? Who are you marrying?”His jaw tightened.“Princess Cleiona Bellos.”Lucia could not believe her ears. “This has been arranged.”Magnus gave her a look.“Oh, not at all. Since helping to take her father's kingdom and destroy her life,I couldn’t help but fall madly in love with her. Yes,obviously it was arranged.
Morgan Rhodes
I started rubbing my temples and she suggested I don't really get headaches. It just hurts me to think.
Kelley Armstrong
Hi! I'm Ethan, I shop at Ikea. I bought a $300 dining suite and it took me three days to assemble!
Douglas Coupland
So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.
Margaret Atwood
Quoting Shakespeare doesn't make you an intellectual. It just makes you a fan of Shakespeare.
Kevin N. Fair
Don't ruin the moment by saying something stupid. There's elegance in things left unsaid.
Kurtis J. Wiebe
Politicians obfuscate. It gets them re-elected. If no-one can understand what is going on, then the perception is that we need someone to guide us through the fog. Many people want to be led. A few people even think that they need to be led.
Sieg Pedde
Great business leaders of our time stand above the crowd not because of what they do, but what they don’t do.
Shawn Casemore
a good friendship euchres the universe.
Michael Hogan
It seems to me, that no matter what we do, no matter what choices we make, there isn’t a happy ending waiting for us at the end of the long road.”“But that doesn’t mean we give up. It doesn’t mean we stop fighting.
Danielle L. Jensen
I think online friends often know you the best.
Jacquelyn Middleton
I can see lights in the distance trembling in the dark cloak of nightCandles and lanterns are dancing, dancing a waltz on All Souls Night.
Loreena McKennitt
I hope I never figure out who broke your heart and if I do, if I do. I'd spend all night losing sleep. I'd spend the night and I'd lose my mind. Well I'd spend the night and I'd lose my mind.
Sara Quin
Oh, I don't wonder babies always cry when they wake up in the night. So often I want to do it too.
L.M. Montgomery
Contentedly sat the old woman. Soon now, the sea would hold no terrors, and the blinds wouldn't have to be down, nor the windows shut; she would even be able to walk along the shore at midnight as of old; and they, whom she had deserted so long ago, would once more shrink from the irresistable energy aura of her new, young body.The sound of the sea came to her, where she sat so quietly; calm sound at first, almost gentle in the soft sibilation of each wave thrust. Farther out, the voices of the water were louder, more raucous, blatantly confident, but the meaning of what they said was blurred by the distance, a dim, clamorous confusion that rustled discordantly out of the gathering night.Night!She shouldn't be aware of night falling, when the blinds were drawn.("The Witch")
A.E. van Vogt
Last night, lost in spaces between star—bays and lakes of clouds, I tossed and turned looking for you
John Geddes
I see you from afar—fragile and shy as a star gleaming through a cloudy rift
John Geddes
...yes, in the obscured sky a moon does float, newly, a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink.
Margaret Atwood
But tonight is a gusty, hurrying night . . . even the clouds racing over the sky are in a hurry and the moonlight that gushes out between them is in a hurry to flood the world.
L.M. Montgomery
The night folded around them with a sweetness and poignancy heightened by the new pale stars that prickled silver fire in the water of the lily ponds, by the scented winds, and by the nearness of each other.
Pauline Gedge
Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon...
Margaret Atwood
Isn't it queer that the things we writhe over at night are seldom wicked things? Just humiliating ones.
L.M. Montgomery
At night the fog was thick and full of light, and sometimes voices.
Erin Bow
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.
Margaret Atwood
Yes, indeed, I am the stuff, the prize property, the recaptured trophy he will put up on the mantelpiece, in a rage every time I move a millimeter or look less polished, less tarted up than he thinks I should look. In a rage, every time I disappoint him. Which will happen every day.
Kaimana Wolff
Somehow it felt familiar, an old story retold, the claws in my shoulder, my arms twisted behind my back, the drag down the street, Will assisting my father and thinking how much fun it was to hunt someone down. I knew it all. Each snarled command was a line from an old but faithless song. “Pipe down! I’m not going to hurt you! I just want to talk to you! This is for your own good!
Kaimana Wolff