Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 5

Let go of all the drama, all that is superficial, all the worry over things you have no control over. Let go of the past. Don't lose yourself in competing and comparing yourself with others. Don't lose yourself in consumerism, in greed, in the acquisition of wealth. What matters the most is that you live. That you live as you, that you live IN your life as your genuine self. Don't put off living. Don't wait until the end of the day to enjoy a couple of hours of life. Don't wait until retirement. Be in whatever it is you do. If you can't, then make every effort to change what it is you do. Whatever you do, do it with care, concern and love. Don't over-complicate your life. Keep it as simple as you can. Do what you love as much as possible. Love what you do as much as possible. Love yourself. Appreciate yourself. Appreciate every drop of life you receive and make the most of it by not shying away from life. Life is meant to be lived. Don't forget to live.
Akiroq Brost
Don't let fear cripple you and keep you from trying new things, changing things, exploring and living a life of adventure. Be courageous, be brave. A whole life is out there just waiting to be lived. Don't wait until it is too late. Seize the opportunity and seize the day. Don't allow yourself to get caught in regret by limiting yourself and your life. Life passes by very quickly. Make the most of every day!
Akiroq Brost
Communication is like a pressure relief valve for your body. When a little pressure gets cooked up inside and needs to be released, you can gently turn the nozzle and release it slowly and gracefully until you feel better, by way of a productive conversation. But if you choose to ignore the warning signals and leave that pressure inside, it's going to grow and inevitably explode and make a mess, by way of an overreaction and possibly an argument.
L.K. Elliott
Always best to start with violence and attempt communication second. People reacted more favorably when they knew you would snuff a few lives to get what you wanted... or for no reason whatsoever.
Michael R. Fletcher
Are you fixing to stay in this country, then, Walter? After you've dug yourself a patch, and made yourself a pile?''I expect my luck will decide that question for me.''Would you call it lucky to stay, or lucky to go?''I'd call it lucky to choose,' said Moody—surprising himself, for that was not the answer he would have given, three months prior.
Eleanor Catton
I have got acquainted with Lofty John. Ilse is a great friend of his and often goes there to watch him working in his carpenter shop. He says he has made enough ladders to get to heaven without the priest but that is just his joke.
L.M. Montgomery
Try as you might, you'll never be able to please an environmentalist. You can stop using coal to heat your house, you can stop throwing out bottles and cans, you can have every factory in Canada shut down and you can buy only organic gluten-free non-GMO food, you can give up your favorite station wagon for a weird electric hybrid, you can stop developing film and buy a never-ending cycle of digital cameras, you can give up your job at a refinery or mill, and they'll still get after you for not enjoying yourself while doing so.
Rebecca McNutt
The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today.
Margaret Atwood
If your spirit is persistently harmless or if it has shown itself to you, in a non-threatening way, then you most definitely have a ghost. The ghost can be frightening, by its very nature. But the ghost will never intentionally frighten you. They will be there for three reasons: 1. They used to live there and are attached to the location 2. They are trying to communicate something to the living or 3. They are protective of somebody who lives in the house and so they are “standing guard” so to speak, over the loved one.
Alexei Maxim Russell
...if it weren't for you, mornings wouldn't be so comforting - slippers wouldn't scrape through the rooms of my heart...
John Geddes
...careful the morning lest it wake from slumber the city half-encumbered by the morning mist ...
John Geddes
Over the water of time I call to youIn a language I do not know.
Ellen S. Jaffe
Wait," Charlotte said. "I'd like to say something, if I may, Papa." He nodded, and Charlotte stood. Her siblings were still looking very grave. She hoped they were in the proper frame of mind to hear what she had to say, especially Branwell. "I have been thinking a great deal about ... My stories." She nodded significantly to them, willing them to understand that she was not talking about writing so much as about crossing over. "Papa was very wise when he called my writing a childish habit, and I think he understands that, for me, its a dangerous one as well." The small square of paper that had caused such consternation lay in front of her on the table. Now she took it up and held it out, looking at each if her siblings in turn. "Emily. Anne. Branwell." She ripped the paper in half. Emily gasped. " I am renouncing my invented worlds and all who live there. If any of you are in the grip if a similar childish habit"- she raised an eyebrow at her brother - "I challenge you to do the same.
Lena Coakley
...this counting blessings was the unlocking of the mystery of joy, joy, "the gigantic secret of the Christian," joy hiding in gratitude ... God had used the dare to give me this; led me all he way to give me this, live fully, fully live. Page 83
Ann Voskamp
We could never agree about Boogie and I didn't share Miriam's reverence for professors. In fact, just in case I haven't mentioned it before, the pride of my office wall is my framed high-school graduation certificate, lit from above. Miriam has reproached me for it. "Take it down, darling," she once pleaded. But it still hangs there.
Mordecai Richler
All the same, it strikes me as unfair that I still have to defend myself against her moral judgements. My continuing need for her approbation is pathetic. Twice now I have stopped myself on the street to remonstrate with her, a crazy old coot talking to himself.
Mordecai Richler
George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as “grossly immoral.” Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection “can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.” On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians; death from fighting is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent American cities. Commenting on how biologists used to describe the killing of starving deer by mountain lions as an act of mercy, Williams wrote: “The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion's lot is no more enviable. Perhaps biology would have been able to mature more rapidly in a culture not dominated by Judeo-Christian theology and the Romantic tradition. It might have been well served by the First Holy Truth from [Buddha's] Sermon at Benares: “Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful...”” As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a “natural” trait is the same as condoning it. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.
Steven Pinker
Most of didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.
Rachel Cusk
Sustenance! Your health is always the best prescription.
Lorii Myers
There is no concept of justice in Cree culture. The nearest word is kintohpatatin, which loosely translates to "you've been listened to." But kintohpatatin is richer than justice - really it means you've been listened to by someone compassionate and fair, and your needs will be taken seriously.
Edmund Metatawabin
. . . for any worthwhile martial arts skill to be pragmatic, it has to be done live, otherwise it is of limited or no use in actual combat
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
Dr. Peter Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists is a precise, passionate, compassionate and brilliantly reasoned work that will illuminate any and all minds capable of openness and curiosity. This is not a bedtime story to help you fall asleep, but a wakeup call that has the best chance of bringing your rational mind back to life.(Review of Dr. Peter Boghossian's book, 'A Manual for Creating Atheists')
Stefan Molyneux
Historical definition of a country's borders... "...here's where my murder geography ends and your murder geography begins, at least until I get more murderers to expand my murder-fest.
Stefan Molyneux
Rights" are something made up by governments to make you feel like you're buying something with your taxes.
Stefan Molyneux
We've got this weird dysgenic situation where we're basically just paying idiots to breed and taxing intelligent people to stay away from each other with anything remotely resembling fertility.
Stefan Molyneux
What goes up, must come down." Well, Issac Newton's law doesn't apply to the internet. That's what people don't realize. When you put something up, as long as there is an internet there will be that same stuff. When you're a senior citizen, what you uploaded to Facebook at a high school party will still be there. Whatever you upload to the internet, no matter how strong your passwords and security are, guaranteed the government or some advertising corporation will look at what you post someday. The only law that applies to the internet is, "For every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction." Post a photograph and you'll get attention. Post your old scanned Kodak slides and family home movies, you'll get a nostalgia rush and you'll reunite people with better days. But post a bad thing, thinking you can go unnoticed, and you'll never be able to crawl out from underneath it.
Rebecca McNutt
Life is swimming to shore with cowboy boots on.
Christopher G. Moore
I don't want to know that you don't want me. I don't want to know what you do without me. I don't want to know what I'll be without you. I dont wanna know. I don't wanna know.
Sara Quin
When I wrote this song I felt pretty unoriginal because everybody writes love songs, and everybody feels like their love is the most important and when their love ends and they get their heart broken, that nobody understands. And…that’s ridiculous, but so am I.
Tegan Quin
How quickly pettiness returns, and that most ignoble form of real estate, the possessive occupation and tyranny over two square inches of human flesh, the wife's cunt.
Leonard Cohen
And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled?
Mordecai Richler
What the fuck is legal in this universe? Stars eat each other, wolves eat the pigs, and Grandma fucks over Little Red Riding Hood.
Rawi Hage
To maintain any degree of sanity, we must believe that everything is interconnected on some level and to experience that level fully once in a while.
Vironika Tugaleva
Every time we mention God we become theologians, and the only question is whether we are going to be good ones or bad ones.
J.I. Packer
Just like the notion of "Internet natives", who have never known a world without Internet access, we, who have lived our entire lives with video games, can be known as "video game natives.
Alexei Maxim Russell
To experience biophilia is to love a diversity that, as limitless as it is fragile, both haunts us and fills us with hope.
Adam Leith Gollner
You know, the act of feeding someone is the ultimate act of care and affection...sharing yourself with someone else through food." He held another mouthful of cake under her nose. "Think about it. We are fed in the Eucharist, by our mothers when we are infants, by our parents as children, by friends at dinner parties, by a lover when we feast on one another's bodies...and on occasion, on another's souls.
Sylvain Reynard
I'm starved." -Juli"How can you be starved? You just ate a huge bowl of popcorn." -Elspeth"Popcorn isn't food, it's popcorn." -Vicki
Lynsay Sands
You know I love you. You're the only one.""She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them.
Margaret Atwood
As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today`s shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift.
Gabor Maté
I'm the parent. It's my job to be here for you, not the other way around.
Danielle Younge-Ullman
It is my sincere desire that my research and hard work will help create a world where we all learn to walk this Earth, safe, enlightened and free from the perils of cruelty, ignorance, and all the other dark and sinister forces, which make assholes possible.
Alexei Maxim Russell
But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit.
Mordecai Richler
We get along like a house on fire these days.
Rebecca McNutt
Full of beautiful grace so we steal their space, and death comes quickly.
Sara Quin
There are two sacred causes in this world,” he said, holding up his pinkie and ring ringer. “Chance and necessity. By chance I was there to help when you had need.
Rachel Hartman
The static’s nice. I could do without the screechi
Peter Watts
If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.
Margaret Atwood
Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.
Mordecai Richler
...when I was a kid, Toronto streets were deserted and quiet on Sundays, except for the sound of church bells I stood on the sidewalk one December listening to the Christmas bells - I've never forgotten that moment...
John Geddes
Maybe this was now normal for Olivier. Maybe every now and then he simply wept. Not in pain or sadness. The tears were just overwhelming memories, rendered into water, seeping out.
Louise Penny
Yeah, you’re right about having entire rooms full of film and photos… in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage… I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides… I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that’s happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,” Alecto responded. “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… The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I’ve been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.
Rebecca McNutt
People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015
David Brooks
So many times the debate of abortion turns to legality. The issue is not legality, the issue is morality. Have you not forgotten? It was legal for Adolf Hitler to place all of those men, women, and children in concentration camps and murder them. Abortion should never be an issue of legality, it is most definitely an issue of morality.
Derrick Sanderson
If you notice, the moral law in the other legal codes separates people (the Laws of Manu, the caste system, the Code of Hammurabi with the slave/owner distinction). In Islam, the violator is inferior to the obedient one. By contrast, in the Hebrew-Christian tradition, the law unifies people. No one is made righteous before God by keeping the law. It is only following redemption that we can truly understand the moral law for what it is---a mirror that indicts and calls the heart to seek God's help. This makes moral reasoning the fruit of spiritual understanding and not the cause of it.
Ravi Zacharias
If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?
Robert J. Sawyer
I am a physician, and as a consequence I see things most clearly in medical terms. I am arguing that we need an immunization program, one that injects people with respect, dignity, and equality. One that inoculates them against hatred.
Izzeldin Abuelaish
Girls did that then – knocked themselves out to support some man’s notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot on the side. Once in a while they even smoked some of that, though not often, because it made Constance cough. It was all very romantic.
Margaret Atwood
Karate is not about techniques and their execution, but about boldness, integrity and fight for justice and common good
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
Demons would often try to make me feel some negative emotion, like hatred or contempt. Because the only way I could become vulnerable to them, is if I indulged in some negative emotion, in their presence. In the realm of hatred and anger, and other negative emotions, demons are the masters.
Alexei Maxim Russell