Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 45

Guys hung out all the time. It didn’t mean they were gay. But when you are gay, you automatically think everybody knows and wonder if you’re safe.
Sean Kennedy
...Fate forced me to become a two-man woman. But there was no effing way I could be a four-man woman.Even metaphysics couldn't keep that from being whorey.
Sierra Dean
She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two.
Margaret Atwood
This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.
Geoff Ryman
I am a rare species, not a stereotype.
Ivan E. Coyote
...summer softens lines that winter cruelly shows...
John Geddes
...You won't age? I promise you this - your hands will go shiny and transparent and at the slightest bruise they'll bleed...
John Geddes
Loghain shook his head in disbelief. "Maker's breath, man, aren't you suppose to have some dignity? Somewhere?""Me? Dignity?""Being the supposed future King and such.""I think Rowan took my dignity."She snorted derisively, folding her arms. "There was nothing else worth having.
David Gaider
My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sigh and make the best of it. I feel I’m older than they are, much older. I feel ancient.
Margaret Atwood
Almost any age is better than twenty-two.
David Rakoff
Then Treece realized a remarkable thing. He understood in a flash that everyone in the world was the same age -no one younger or older than anyone else. He could not understand it, but he knew it to be true. Was there something in the air of the world that made people appear to be old or middle-aged or young?
P.K. Page
Even in your twenties you know how old you are. I'm twenty-three, you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It's a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I'm – you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you're not. You're thirty-five. And then you're bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it's decades before you admit it.
Sara Gruen
Life wears us down around the edges. The stress of life and its neces­sities cracks things. We learn to protect ourselves. We learn not to let so much of the world in, because some­times it’s all too much, and we don’t have the resilience we need to survive it. When we’re six, we make best friends easily. When we’re fifty, we don’t. That’s age and expe­rience for you.But books are different. We can let books in. We can wrap them up in our hearts. We can approach them as if we’re still young and open. Even so, it’s not as simple. Because we’re not as simple.(Source: State of the Writer, sort of, September 2015 - blog post)
Michelle Sagara
He had the beginning of wrinkles and the easy manner of one who has already made his mistakes.
Donald Kingsbury
They say you’re only as old as you feel but try telling that to a ninety-year-old on their deathbed, just wishing he could do all the bloody things he wants to do.
Karina Halle
You know you're old when you're watching Karate Kid and you realize you're more attracted to Mr. Miagi than Ralph Macchio.
Hayley Linfield
No, time has silverted the dark sheen of her hair, and thickened her body, and lined the corners of her eyes and her lips.He saw in them the hints of the smile he loved, and knew, to be fair, that time had been no kinder to him. Or perhaps, it had been just as kind; for she did not look the part of a young girl, and she was not: she was stronger, wiser, and more just than the fear of youth allowed; she gave him the shelter that he needed, on the rare occasions that that need drove him. She trusted him, always; she looked up to him, still; he strove, in every way, to continue to live up to her expectation. She was the one person in his life he did not wish to disappoint.
Michelle Sagara West
What else do I have to offer? Nothing happens to me anymore. That’s the reality of getting old, and I guess that’s really the crux of the matter. I’m not ready to be old yet.
Sara Gruen
In your thirties something strange starts to happen. It’s a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I’m — you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you’re not. You’re thirty-five. And then you’re bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it’s decades before you admit it.
Sara Gruen
Age is a terrible thief. Just when you're getting the hang of life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back. It makes you ache and muddies your head and silently spreads cancer throughout your spouse.
Sara Gruen
When it gets dark, it's only because god has tucked me in a cleft of the rock and covered me, protected, with His hand? In the pitch, I feel like I'm falling, sense the bridge giving way, God long absent. In the dark, the bridge and my world shakes, cracking dreams.But maybe this is true reality: It is in the dark that God is passing by. the bridge and our lives shake not because God has abandoned, but the exact opposite: God is passing by. God is in the tremors. Dark is the holiest ground, the glory passing by. In the blackest, God is closest, at work, forging His perfect and right will. Though it is black and we can't see and our world seems to be free-falling and we feel utterly alone, Christ is most present to us, I-beam supporting in earthquake.
Ann Voskamp
God holds us in the untamed moments too.
Ann Voskamp
Who trusts the Bridge Builder when you wake to snow on your blankets and winter blasting through cracked walls and dinner for four is a fifty cent box of Kraft Dinner rationed in half and your dad tells you every single day that he just doesn't know how there is ever going to be enough?How do you count on life when the hopes don't add up?A morning in late November, joy shimmers.The hopes don't have to add up. The blessings do....count blessings and discover who can be counted on.
Ann Voskamp
The real problem of life is never a lack of time. The real problem of life - in my life - is lack of thanksgiving.
Ann Voskamp
God can enter into me, even me, and use these hands, these feet, to be His love, a love that goes on and on and on forever, endless cycle of grace.
Ann Voskamp
When service is unto people, the bones can grow weary, the frustration deep. Because, agrees Dorothy Sayers, 'whenever man is made the centre of things, he becomes the storm-centre of trouble. The moment you think of serving people, you begin to have a notion that other people owe you something for your pains... You will begin to bargain for reward, to angle for applause.'When the laundry is for the dozen arms of children or the dozen legs, it's true, I think I'm due some appreciation. So comes a storm of trouble and lightning strikes joy. But when Christ is center, when dishes, laundry, work, is my song of thanks to Him, joy rains. Passionately serving Christ alone makes us the loving servant to all. When the eyes of the heart focus on God, and the hands on always washing the feet of Jesus alone - the bones, they sing joy, and the work returns to it's purest state: eucharisteo. The work becomes worship, a liturgy of thankfulness.
Ann Voskamp
I make soup and I back bread and I know my supreme need is joy in God and I know I can't experience deep joy in God until I deep trust in God. I shine sinks and polish through to the realization that trusting God is my most urgent need. If I deep trusted God in all the facets of my life, wouldn't that deep heal my anxiety, my self-condemnation, my soul holes? The fear is suffocating, terrorizing, and I want the remedy, and it is trust. Trust is everything. If fear keeps our lives small, does a life that receives all of God in this moment grow large too?
Ann Voskamp
I receive grace. And through me, grace could flow on. Like a cycle of water in continuous movement, grace is meant to fall, a rain...again, again, again. I could share the grace, multiply the joy, extend the table of the feast, enlarge the paradise of His presence. I am blessed. I can bless.
Ann Voskamp
Trauma's storm can mask the Christ and feelings can lie. I draw all the hurting voices close and I tough their scars with a whisper: sometimes we don't fully see that in Christ, because of Christ, through Christ, He does give us all things good - until we have the perspective of years.In time, years, dust settles.In memory, ages, God emerges.
Ann Voskamp
Eucharisteo has taught me to trust that there is always enough God. He has no end.
Ann Voskamp
Eucharisteo means 'to give thanks,' and give is a verb, something that we do. God calls me to do thanks. to give the thanks away. That thanks-giving might literally become thanks-living. That our lives become the very blessings we have received. I am blessed. I can bless. Imagine! I could let Him make me the gift! I could be the joy!
Ann Voskamp
In the end it will not matter how we have told our story, but only how God sees it.
Daniel I. Block
John Wesley’s own grave holds the bones of many other people, including at least five ministers. One can only imagine the bickering.
Jared Brock
The Pharisees had an ethic of avoidance, and Jesus had an ethic of involvement.
Mark Buchanan
For the place God calls us into isn’t doubt free—how can any place where we walk by faith and not by sight be that? No, the holy wild is where we have driving and haunting doubts, God-hungry doubts that pull us to our knees, force us to the Word, make us wrestle all night and not let go until He blesses us. The holy wild throngs with true skeptics.
Mark Buchanan
God’s definition of going well is unique, distinct, almost eccentric. His definition of wellness is not about health, finances, or job security. It’s not about unfailing protection from the vagaries and dangers of a broken world. It’s not about life being fair. It’s about acceptance.
Mark Buchanan
Laughter—just good bone-shaking, belly-jiggling, light-in-the-head laughter, is a sure sign of health. The only one who hates it is Satan and all his wannabes.
Mark Buchanan
We honestly think that we ourselves and those around us should be proficient with spiritual power, moving and acting with agility and endurance, wisdom and purity, able to conquer long-established habits of sloth and rebelliousness, simply on the basis of our desire and effort and sincerity...We have to train for the spiritual life.
Mark Buchanan
Most of us save our best behavior for those whom we barely know and show our worst side to those we know the best.
Sheila Wray Gregoire
When our hearts, minds, and souls are deep within the reality of living loved, we discover that most of those "rules" from Sunday school are simply our new characteristics and our family traits. They are the fruit born of a meaningful, life-changing relationship—they are the flowers of life in the Vine.
Sarah Bessey
If I believe the same things today I did yesterday I've learned nothing.
A.E. van Vogt
I fit perfectly within my vibration. I am wholly complete in the knowledge that I am who I am supposed to be!
Debbie A. Anderson
He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.
Margaret Atwood
Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.
Peter Watts
This murdered girl troubles me. After the first shock, nobody at school says much about her. Even Cordelia does not want to talk about her. It’s as if this girl has done something shameful, herself, by being murdered.
Margaret Atwood
How can a school prepare you for murderers and mad-men?' Taro asked. 'Friends who would betray you to your death. People in authority who use their power to perform the most unnatural acts. People hating you because you can't do things you aren't supposed to be doing anyway. That's a lot to expect of a school.
Moira J. Moore
What kind of dark, twisted mind preys on young women? I think it was Poe that said the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical thing in the universe, and if that was true… I was John Milton.
Bruce Crown
Ashes, ashes.” Her whispered words of an old rhyme smashed through the silence as thunder, and in unison, the shadow figures answered.“We all fall down.
A.F. Stewart
A murder was never about brawn, it began and ended in the brain and the brain could justify anything.
Louise Penny
I'm not a woman and i'm not a man, i'm just a thing with breasts and a penis".
Stuart Francis
Rules meant order. Without them they’d be killing each other. It began with butting in, with parking in disabled spaces, with smoking in elevators. And it ended in murder.
Louise Penny
The bistro was his secret weapon in tracking down murderers. Not just in Three Pines, but in every town and village in Quebec. First he found a comfortable café or brasserie, or bistro, then he found the murderer. Because Armand Gamache knew something many of his colleagues never figured out. Murder was deeply human, the murdered and the murderer. To describe the murderer as a monstrosity, a grotesque, was to give him an unfair advantage. No. Murderers were human, and at the root of each murder was an emotion. Warped, no doubt. Twisted and ugly. But an emotion. And one so powerful it had driven a man to make a ghost.Gamache's job was to collect the evidence, but also to collect the emotions. And the only way he knew to do that was do get to know the people. To watch and listen. To pay attention, and the best way to do that was in a deceptively casual way in a deceptively casual setting.Like the bistro.
Louise Penny
Because this is Upper Canada, after all, and 'caning' sounds more English than 'having ass whipped to death with hickory stick.
Allan Dare Pearce
This school is enough to make anyone a communist.
Jo Walton
And what if the other kids laugh at me?” Kerry complained to her parents as she nibbled on a piece of toast that morning. “I have a Cape Breton accent! They’ll know I’m from Canada and they’ll start asking me if I lived in an igloo or ate maple syrup, bacon and seal meat every day!”“You’re really overreacting,” Susan chuckled, sipping on a glass of orange juice. “Canada is a lot like the States and the only thing separating both countries is an imaginary boarder! If anyone laughs at you, tell them it doesn’t snow year-round, you got free health care while you were there and that you never rode a polar bear to school. Besides, do you know how many popular movies and TV shows from the States were filmed in Canada?”“It’s not just the Canada stuff mom,” Kerry sighed worriedly. “I’m from Dym, it’s an industrial dump!”“Yeah, and have you looked at Pittsburgh lately?” Susan asked. “Full of coal mines and steel mills, just like Sydney was when we lived there! I actually rather came to like the pollution, I don’t think I’d ever want to leave it.
Rebecca McNutt
In the twenty-first century, we use a nineteenth-century school model with twentieth-century values. There’s clearly something wrong with this picture.
Zander Sherman
I know what I'm talking about, Alecto! When I think of Jud, I think of the times he wanted to be a coal miner, the times he took Wendy and me sailing in the harbour, the times he showed me how to play soccer, but I forgot all the bullying and I’ll never understand why. And now you ask me, you ask me what happened once we were in high school. You said you didn’t understand what having a family was like, so ask me!” Mandy was shouting at him without even realizing it, her words sharp and unforgiving.“I….” Alecto started, hesitating for a moment. “You don’t seem like yourself Mandy Valems, not at all….”“No, go ahead! You want to know what having a real family is like?” Mandy snapped, turning to stare at him coldly. “Ask me what happened, I’ll tell you anything you want to know!”“…What happened?” Alecto asked quietly, looking nervous and confused.“I stayed late after school in shop class when I was in grade 9, trying to keep my lousy grades up. I was building a birdhouse, something like that, and that was when Jud and all his popular jock friends came storming in, laughing and swearing like a bunch of pigs,” Mandy continued. “So ask me what happened next.”“I… I don’t want to ask you what happened,” Alecto replied.“Ask me!” Mandy yelled.“Alright, what happened next…?” Alecto questioned.
Rebecca McNutt
No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.
Saul Bellow
You know what would be fun,” our school’s administration likely thought, huffing glue out of an old sock. “What if we make our cruellest eleven-year-olds assess each other in wet spandex for an hour every day for a week in the dead of winter?
Scaachi Koul
Registration Day' by Gavin Gunhold (1899— ) Toronto Review of Poetry, 1947On registration day at taxidermy schoolI distinctly saw the eyes of the stuffed mooseMove.
Gordon Korman