Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 5

You should find something better to do with your time,” Mandy told him. “I spend my time shooting people, and then I take them to darkrooms and blow them up.”“…Come again?” Alecto questioned with a tone of alarm in his voice. “I take photographs and develop them myself, I’ve got my own darkroom… it was a joke,” Mandy laughed. “I love photography and I’m gonna be a photojournalist someday.”“Really?” Alecto asked. For the first time since she’d met him, he sounded slightly enthusiastic. “…I take photographs and I film my own home movies, I have a darkroom as well… but I can’t be a photojournalist like you… I can’t be anything… still, at least I can take photographs, it’s fun.
Rebecca McNutt
Alecto Sydney Steele, an entity of few words whom society managed to overlook as it rapidly dove into the 21st century. Everything about him, his interests, his friends, his own life, was constantly in danger of becoming an anachronism. And caught up in that mess was Mearth, not exactly evil in nature but just misunderstood. A very long time ago Alecto’s life had been all incandescent sparkles and Kodachrome, but that was before the environmental movement changed Mearth from a perfectly nice and kind guardian, to a deranged and malevolent monster.
Rebecca McNutt
Hey Alecto, film this!” she called out. With the slide being as tall as a two-storey house, it felt slightly risky being up there. “On second thought, why don’t you come up here? It’s a blast being up here.”“I don’t really like to be in high places,” said Alecto as he filmed her, the camera lens reflecting the entire playground, which was partially secluded by tall trees that cast otherworldly shadows dancing across the ground.“If you don’t like being in high places, then why’d you take so many drugs in the seventies?” Mandy questioned jokingly. “Do you want me to go up there and push you off the top of that slide?” Alecto threatened coldly.“You’d never do that, we’re best friends!” Mandy pointed out. She reached over and picked a bright red maple flower from one of the long branches of the trees, tossing it down to him. “Even in this failing 21st century, where people are cell phone addicts and crude humor and violence is the norm, even when society falls apart and drowns in its own mistakes, we’ll still be best friends!” She looked incredibly eccentric, never mind the fact that she was an adult woman wearing a trippy rainbow Pucci dress from the 1970’s, standing on top of a slide at a children’s playground. Alecto didn’t seem to mind, he just continued to film her with his camera like she’d asked him to.
Rebecca McNutt
When I was in junior high school, I used to think that Disney's 1990's paranormal television program 'So Weird' was every kid's ideal life - not going to school, living on a tour bus, having rockstar parents, traveling all over North America and never staying in one place for more than a week or so. Of course, eventually the realization hits you that the kids out there who really do live like this, pulling up stakes every week and never staying with their friends or having a permanent residence, aren't really happy.
Rebecca McNutt
Even friends need private spaces, if only within the depths of their own souls, where no one else is allowed to intrude.
Mary Balogh
If this were a proper world, beautiful faces would belong to beautiful people. Good people with kind hearts and clever minds would always have bright eyes and dazzling smiles, and bad people would have scraggly hair and warty noses. That way if you saw one of them coming, you could cross to the other side of the street and avoid them altogether. But this is not a proper world. In our world, many bad people look quite nice, and many good people are not beautiful at all. Many good people aren't pretty or cute or even interesting-looking.
Brit Trogen
I think it is because I have a habit, when I am bored or disgusted with people of stepping suddenly into my own world and shutting the door. People resent this -- I suppose it is only natural to resent a door being shut in your face. They call it slyness when it is only self-defense.
L.M. Montgomery
I don't say Valancy deliberately murdered these lovers as she outgrew them. One simply faded away as another came. Things are very convenient in this respect in Blue Castles.
L.M. Montgomery
The essence of warrior traits are demonstrated by : integrity with self, and honesty with others
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
I’ve seen a lot of stuff… maybe I’ve seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I’ve seen what they can do, how evil they can be… I’ve seen the Holocaust and I’ve seen Jonestown, I’ve seen the Vietnam War and I’ve seen Hiroshima… I’ve seen the Chernobyl disaster… I’ve seen the World Trade Center attack… I’ve been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive,” Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding.
Rebecca McNutt
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
I would have to confess that in the land of the toubabu, I had managed to save only myself.
Lawrence Hill
. . . 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 love introverts. They don't waste words. Excessive extroverts can be very wasteful. I don't trust them in any kind of intricate or delicate matter.
Alexei Maxim Russell
I love your loins, that's all,' Rachel says quietly. 'And now I love the word itself, and how words change, I love that too. And all the parts of you, I love them. That's all. And I'm not sad,' she whispers, gasping a little at the shock of her own tears, hot and extravagant, tears that catch the light in her lashes before they drop and roll across Zach's thighs, sparkling capsules, kaleidoscopic, the flow dynamic.
Emma Richler
The warrior guided by the spirit serves humanity, the warrior without, serves the ego
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
People always say that digital cameras are much more stable than film cameras, but the truth is that digital cameras, or any kind of digital technology, is one of the most unstable things in the world. A film camera can last decades if you know how to look after it, but digital things can break down instantly. A violent storm, a nuclear bomb, even something as minor as a cracked screen or the releasing of newer models, can make a digital product just a block of useless metal.
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
To live for the hope of something isn’t really living at all, and so, like a child putting away its toys and picking up a tool, he marched to Lyca’s bathroom, to shower off the stench of failure, soap up the death of hope, then wash away the ashes of his love for Daphne.
Mark A. Rayner
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
Imagining that you are deep and complex, but others are simple, is one of the primary signs of malignant selfishness.
Stefan Molyneux
I stare past her at the inspirational kitten posters. There's one of a soaking-wet kitten climbing out of a toilet with the caption "it could be worse!""Just tell me whatever it is you're thinking," Mrs. Paulsen says. "Whatever is going through your mind right now.""I hope they didn't actually drop a cat in the toilet to get that picture," I choke out. "...Pardon?""Nothing. Sorry.
Robin Stevenson
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
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
Margaret Atwood
One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
Saul Bellow
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
They [feminists] share the instinct for tyranny and destruction - and they are filled with self-loathing. In the end, leftist feminists yearn to submit to, and submerge themselves within, a despotic monolith. Because they despise their own society and are bent on its destruction, they cannot concede that adversarial cultures may be more evil, because that would legitimize their own host society - and they can't allow that. It would rob them of the moral indignation -- and the identity of being victims -- that lies at the foundation of their politics of hate.
Jamie Glazov
The one plus side to demonic infestation is that children cannot be harmed by a demon. The sanctified aura of a child somehow repels the demon and they can only oppress them if the parent makes a contract allowing them to do so. Because they can be very clever in tricking people into agreeing to additional contracts, it is important to never converse with a demon. Either call in a priest or move out as soon as possible.
Alexei Maxim Russell
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
Evan nuzzled his chin into the crook of Dan's neck, finding the spot that always made Dan squirm and laugh. "I love you, Danny.""You gets so fucking sappy after I let you top," Dan responded, but he didn't move away. "We should stick a spigot in you, drain it out, and boil up some maple syrup." "You stick your spigot in me, I wouldn't be the one topping anymore.""Nice. You freak." "You're the one who wanted to make maple syrup out of my sappiness," Evan protested...
Kate Sherwood
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