Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 46

The inaugural morning at Merston High was officially over. It was no longer a mysterious place in Melody's imagination, filled with endless possibilities and hooks on which to hang hopes for a better tomorrow. It was completely - boringly - normal. Like meeting an online crush after months of e-flirting, the reality didn't live up to the fantasy. It was dull, predictable, and way more attractive in the photos.
Lisi Harrison
Because whipping an atlas at Jackson's head while he was flirt-touching that Frankie girl in geography would have been very satisfying. And beating him with the Eiffel Tower snowglobe while he kissed Cleo in French would have been tres cathartic. But she hadn't. Instead she'd been egg-like: a hard shell on the outside, and a runny mess on the inside.
Lisi Harrison
And the person who says that the only way to please them is to restrict options for others is, if you ask me, the one who deserves it least. And that’s my opinion, expressed as politely as possible.
David Gaider
Me being in love with a girl and wanting her to be with me, doing what I need to do to make her stay with me; it affects no one, yet it’s terrifying to people and they think you’re a monster.
Sara Quin
We, gays, can get married in Canada. We let heterosexuals too, but that was a huge thing, we had to have a referendum and a vote, it’s crazy! But then we were like, if they want to get married.. that’s cool. That’s gonna destroy their relationships, but.. Heterosexuals deserve the same rights as homosexuals.
Tegan Quin
No matter whether you’re a gay or a mixed race couple; when you’re drawn together, ultimately it doesn’t matter what everybody thinks because it’s so honest, true, and sincere. How can that be wrong?
Tegan Quin
She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost
Eleanor Catton
Until the War, we claimed to be equal; simpletons, some say, but equal man to man.
Allan Dare Pearce
Equality is a myth to protect the weak. some of us are strong in the Force, others are not. Only a fool believes otherwise.
Drew Karpyshyn
I am an educated black woman in a time when educated black people will be called upon to risk everything for the rights of black people everywhere.
Allan Dare Pearce
We are free, but we are not equal. We are free, but not as free as other people in this land are free.
Allan Dare Pearce
But, ladies and gentlemen, we will also be asked to make sacrifices in matters that are not our affair and that do not concern us, sacrifices that would leave our people bleeding or wounded, or even dead, from battle. There is no equality for us in this lifetime.
Allan Dare Pearce
To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success...with a society that provides opportunities for all.
Malcolm Gladwell
What if we all stopped fighting to belong and realized that we already do? What if we acknowledged, in each interaction with ourselves and with others, the eternal, beautiful interconnected energy that flows between us? What if we recognized our equality and celebrated our differences? Imagine how the world could be.
Vironika Tugaleva
There is no need to become unique. We already are unique. There is no need to become equal. We already are equal. The greatest tragedies of humankind have come from people trying to force sameness on the level we are different, and trying to become different on the level we are the same. Peace is a matter of recognizing what is already there, not creating something new.
Vironika Tugaleva
Push to achieve your dreams. Don't let anyone push you out of dreamland.
Christy Birmingham
Let's go for our dreams and be stronger than any obstacles.
Christy Birmingham
You always use that word "remember",' said Milena. 'You say, "remember, team". You never tell us to think.
Geoff Ryman
No true love is possible, Lewis demonstrates, until we abandon our claims, our rights, our grievances. Until then we will be trapped in the obscurity of our heart's mixed motives, our will to possess, to control, to be our own gods.
Michael D. O'Brien
...I'm not in control and without a firm spot, like Archimedes I can't move the world - let alone your heart..
John Geddes
...freedom of conscience does not mean being uncontrolled - we have to control ourselves and at times submit to others...
John Geddes
...I'm a modern mountebank - I believe in Physiognomy - after all, we are in control of our face - it's the map of where we've been...
John Geddes
Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.
Peter Watts
Why do I lunge for control instead of joy?...do I thin Jesus grace too impotent to give me the full life...Whenever I am blind to joys well, isn't it because I don't believe in Gods care? P 130
Ann Voskamp
Just breathe," my mom would say, "Ten tiny breaths... Seize them. Feel them. Love them.
K.A. Tucker
We are born with the need for a leader, someone to control the conflict between each individual's need. An alpha in the house, an alpha at work, an alpha in the church and in the White House.
Colin McAdam
And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy-living and working inside of coding's predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our pay checks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random.
Douglas Coupland
Control.... is not what we need.What we need is to bend to the tempest like pine and palm trees - flexible, adaptive, attuned, yet fully rooted in our principles.
Patricia Pearson
I want to give a name to my would-be killer. What should I call him? Something that will ease his presence in my mind, make him look foolish, like he is of no threat and never was, which is in fact the truth. I don't want his real name, which is meaningless to me, but instead something I control, something I own, some way to own that piano-idiot who attacked me.
Jacob Wren
Zach wanting to see me next Wednesday is almost like Zach asking me on a date, if I were a regular girl wanting a regular relationship.But I’m not a regular girl. I don’t want to hold hands in the hall at school and slow dance at prom and see a movie with Zach. I don’t want to be the girl he dates senior year and loses interest in when he goes off to college. I want to be just fast enough for Zach to have to run to catch up, because if I stay ahead, I won’t ever have to see his retreating back.
Laurie Elizabeth Flynn
I overheard a young man once saying to his wife, "I can't control you. That's the problem and it's been the problem ever since day one!" And then I heard her answer him and heard her terrible voice. "No!" she said. "The problem isn't that you can't control me, the problem is that you're trying to. Why don't you stop worrying about controlling me and start worrying about controlling yourself?
Merle Shain
I came to realize that good and evil were out of my reach, that time was the only thing I had any control over. I could buy time, create intervals. I could not truly make the world a better place, but I could make part of it a better place for a short while.
Sylvain Neuvel
It’s all about control. Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to become master of your own destiny, you have more to learn. Parkinson’s is a perfect metaphor for lack of control. Every unwanted movement in my hand or arm, every twitch that I cannot anticipate or arrest, is a reminder that even in the domain of my own being, I am not calling the shots. I tried to exert control by drinking myself to a place of indifference, which just exacerbated the sense of miserable hopelessness.
Michael J. Fox
Each person in your life is a teacher, each experience in your life is a lesson. Living is like looking into a mirror, every teacher is you.
L.J Vanier
The president is not at all like the powerful icon I imagined her to be. She’s more like I remember Amma: small and delicate with a sari that dances behind her as she walks. Of course, the president is clad in white, the color that shows eternal mourning of a lost child, while Amma never wore white. She wore reds and oranges and deep greens. Colors of celebration, of happiness. Perhaps she wears white now. Now that I am dead to her.
Holly Bodger
And yet... you wouldn't want it to stop hurting... you wouldn't want to forget your little mother even if you could.
L.M. Montgomery
...What was wrong between Diana and me was that she was too much a mother to me, and as I had had one mother, and lost her, I was not in a hurry to acquire another--not even a young and beautiful one with whom I could play Oedipus to both our hearts' content. If I could manage it, I had no intention of being anybody's own dear laddie, ever again.
Robertson Davies
She used to call me on the phone and scream, “I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, I AM GOING TO CHOP YOU INTO PIECES SO SMALL, YOU WILL BE A POWDER AND NO ONE WILL FIND YOU.
Scaachi Koul
But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.
Mary Balogh
You know who you belong to, Jack?”“Yeah.”“Yourself.”He’s wrong, actually, I belong to Ma.
Emma Donoghue
Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet.
Saul Bellow
And maybe, although it was a thing you could hardly bear to think about, like death or your last judgment, maybe he would be the last one ever and he would walk away now and it would only be a question of waiting for it all to end and hoping for better things in the next world. But that was silly, it was never too late.
Brian Moore
I saw a lot of men die there. Most men. Do you know what killed them?”…”Despair,” said Finney. “They believed themselves to be prisoners. I lived with those men, ate the same maggot-infested food, slept in the same beds, did the same back-breaking work. But they died and I lived. Do you know why?” “You were free.” “I was free. Milton was right…the mind is its own place. I was never a prisoner. Not then, not now.
Louise Penny
We drove down Corydon avenue towards my mother's apartment. How are you doing, she asked me? Fine, fine, I said. I wanted to tell her that I felt I was dying from rage and that I felt guilty about everything and that when I was a kid I woke up every morning singing, that I couldn't wait to leap out of bed and rush out of the house into the magical kingdom that was my world, that dust made visible in sunbeams gave me real authentic joy, that my sparkly golden banana-seated bike with the very high sissy bar took my breath away, the majesty of it, that it was mine, that there was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine, and that now I wake up every morning reminding myself that control is an illusion, taking deep breaths and counting to ten trying to ward off panic attacks and hoping that my own hands hadn't managed to strangle me while I slept.
Miriam Toews
Either way, he was always staring into a bottomless pit, or into a whirlpool that forever sucked him inexorably inward to its vortex.
Mary Balogh
The aristocrats had to force them to do their jobs. After all, human beings are not badgers. We aren't molded to stoop.
Andrew Rimas Evan D.G. Fraser
Walking was not fast enough so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.Flying isn't fast enough, not fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can go only as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.
Margaret Atwood
You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick.
Anne Carson
You do not require a license to love someone; you don’t need to pass any complicated tests. Love does not have age limitations, rules, or restrictions. Love is our birthright—it is the one thing that all humans know how to do, the one thing we all deserve. You can’t force it or fake it. You can know someone for an entire lifetime, and not feel a drop of love for them. And you can know someone for a single day, and give your heart to them completely.
Nadia Scrieva
And this is precisely where the tension lies: Panthera tigris and Homo sapiens are actually very much alike, and we are drawn to many of the same things, if for slightly different reasons. Both of us demand large territories; both of us have prodigious appetites for meat; both of us require control over our living space and are prepared to defend it, and both of us have an enormous sense of entitlement to the resources around us. If a tiger can poach on another's territory, it probably will, and so, of course, will we. A key difference, however, is that tigers only take what they need.
John Vaillant
Last night I watched the weather channel, as is my habit. Elsewhere in the world there are floods: roiling brown water, bloated cows floating by, survivors huddled on rooftops. Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: People must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual.
Margaret Atwood
Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.
Peter Watts
Remember some books are meant to be tasted, some books are meant to be chewed and, finally, some books are meant to be swallowed whole.
Robin S. Sharma
The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. A good-natured smile is forever on its lips...I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at a sloth in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of scientific probing.
Yann Martel
I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it...I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.
Yann Martel
Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.
Michael J. Fox
Walk in kindness toward the Earth and every living being. Without kindness and compassion for all of Mother Nature’s creatures, there can be no true joy; no internal peace, no happiness. Happiness flows from caring for all sentient beings as if they were your own family, because in essence they are. We are all connected to each other and to the Earth.
Sylvia Dolson
Like us, animals feel love, joy, fear and pain, but they cannot grasp the spoken word. It is our obligation to speak on their behalf ensuring their well-being and lives are respected and protected.
Sylvia Dolson
And Mrs. Treaclebunny has promised to speak English from now on as well. In fact, she said when she goes to England, that's all she speaks anyway because the animals speak English there. She says anyone who has read children's books with animals in them set in England would know that. Is The Wind in the Willows written in Mole with a little Ratty thrown in? Is Winnie-the-Pooh written in Bear? No, it's English, because that's what the animals there speak. I didn't know that before. Travel is so broadening.
Polly Horvath
How can we expect wild animals to survive if we give them nowhere in the wild to live?
Anthony Douglas Williams