Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 51

A man who never makes mistakes has long since ceased to do anything new. A man who is always making mistakes is a doomed man with swollen ambitions. But he who judiciously salts success with mistake is the rapid learner.
Donald Kingsbury
If you live long enough as a parent nowadays, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn't bother to know about along with the ones you do know about all too well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself.
Alice Munro
After each dream, Frankie woke with a start, soaked in tears. But she found no relief in the peaceful silence of her room, because there everything was real. And the guilt was too immense to bear. Each time she opened her eyes, she'd quickly shut them. And wish that she had woken up for the very last time.
Lisi Harrison
Oh, I know I'm a great trial to you, Marilla," said Anne repentantly. "I make so many mistakes. But then just think of all the mistakes I don't make, although I might.
L.M. Montgomery
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
John Kenneth Galbraith
You're the same as you were yesterday and the day before. Nothing has changed. Not really. Forget what troubles you. Regret nothing, but learn from any mistakes you make. Tomorrow will be a brighter day, I promise.
Morgan Rhodes
In time you will see that you were exactly where you were supposed to be.
L.J Vanier
Your success is your responsibility. Take the initiative, do the work, and persist to the end.
Lorii Myers
Managing excuses means not excusing yourself from the responsibility you need to take with your thought, words, and actions.
Lorii Myers
For so long, I was stuck in "either or" thinking. Either I had to change myself, or change the world. Either it was his fault or my fault. Either you had to stop acting that way or I had to stop reacting this way. Either there was something wrong with me or something wrong with them. I would fluctuate between both ends of this dynamic. I'd blame myself for some time and do everything I could to change. When that became tiresome, I'd blame the other, doing everything I could to make them change. When the resentment and frustration became too strong, I'd blame myself again.I've learned that it's never either or. It's always both. I've also learned that, because it's always both, there's no such thing as fault. Fault is only something we can ascribe when we see things superficially. When we look deeper, we see multi-layered, complex systems of causes and effects which affect and are affected by all individuals involved. Fault is a useless concept. Responsibility, however, is the most helpful concept of them all.It's not my fault. It's not his or yours or theirs either. But it is all our responsibility. When we come together like this, we don't have to see-saw back and forth, passing on guilt and blame. We can grow. We can evolve. We can build a better world.
Vironika Tugaleva
Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace stood in their doorway, ceremoniously, to watch me go, and I felt as if I were a ship with their hope on it, dropping down over the horizon.
Alice Munro
Our behavior, our feelings, our self-worth, our abilities, and our actions are never hinged to that of another.-Akiroq
Akiroq Brost
If you're struggling with problems or issues and you don't take the time to look after yourself, this will affect your ability to do well for others. Everything will suffer, your interactions, your relationships and the things you set out to do. It is necessary to take rest when you need it, to look after yourself, to keep yourself healthy, and to take some reprieve. Taking the best care of your health that you can is vital. There is no shame in looking after yourself! Being at the best you can be will allow you to give your best. It is not noble or loving to constantly sacrifice your well-being for that of others. People who love you would never want that from you. It hurts everyone involved.Take care of yourself first!
Akiroq Brost
‎"If there is no discipline, there is anarchy. Good citizenship demands attention to responsibilities as well as rights.
Joe Clark
Life is change. If you aren't growing and evolving, you're standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead.
Louise Penny
The lights flickered, the pain went away, and her mother was holding her, singing ‘Sleep sweet sleep’. (The Children of Ankh series) Kim Cormack
Kim Cormack
Alana Marks had always known she was different. From her gypsy childhood, to the way she now made her living in the movies, she'd always lived on the edge. She'd been paid to leap from a sixteenth story window, roll a car to a cliff edge, get thrown off a speeding train and dragged into a river by a runaway horse. At the moment, she was about to set herself on fire and jump out of a burning barn.
Barbara Kyle
It’s a hard thing to accept that someone wants you dead. It forces you to decide if you have anything worth living for.
Scott Overton
I'd told him what it had been like, living on thew streets. How the police were to be avoided at all costs, how they never helped you if you were homeless or busking. How they pushed you around and made you leave public spaces. How they let other people treat you like garbage without intervening. Cops would never support someone like me. Never.' - Eyes Like Mine
Sheena Kamal
A woman is entitled to her secrets. She should be able to hide them away for as long as she wants, without people constantly prying, trying to take a peek inside her head. But secrets are exhausting and that's the plain truth of the thing. The effort of keeping them locked away, shielding them from view......I'm only human, after all. I look away from him, though, because it is the only way I can do this.
Sheena Kamal
What do I have to give to love, to feed it so that it grows lush and beautiful like you see in the movies? The happy ones, I mean.......I'm talking about the good love that some people get to have, the kind that nourishes the soul, helps it bloom in the springtime no matter how frigid the winter that precedes it. Everything I have broken or bent somehow, stained so bad that no amount of extra-strength detergent could rub it all out, no matter what the ad says. I have no money to offer to love, no wisdom or kindness. Inside me I have nothing but vast reserves of suspicion and heartache, a current that runs so deep and dark I feel its chill right to my core. And, as it turns out, this current never plays me false.
Sheena Kamal
Simon shook his head. ‘The Nazis in Germany…the Japanese here in Shanghai…Treating people as less than human because of the shape of their faces or the sound of their names. Sometimes it feels like the whole damn world is unraveling.
Daniel Kalla
They'd run all these tests on him and decided he wasn't racist. He wasn't, either, but not because he thought about it particularly. He just couldn't see the point. It just made for a lot of hassle, being that way, so why be that way? Nobody was going to go back and live where they lived before, were they, and if they did (he vaguely suspected) there wouldn't be any Mongolian barbecue and maybe we'd all be listening to Pentecostal Metal and anyway the President was black.
William Gibson
Slavery stands as an affront to human dignity.
Allan Dare Pearce
Mom says crap like that comes from people who've accomplished so little in life that they feel the need to lift themselves above someone, anyone. So they pick skin color or religion or sexual orientation and say, "Well, I might not be much, but at least I'm not a..." I'd look at those guys, and see the truth of her words.
Kelley Armstrong
Her anger at the young woman's stubbornness quickly prompted recollections of all the times she'd found herself on one side or another of these meaningless, bigoted demarcations; all the times she'd been made to feel alien to some stranger's expectation of what constituted the right and normal world---the color of her skin, the ethnicity of the man she'd chosen to marry, even her tomboy daughter.
Omar El Akkad
It is unlikely that we will hit a home run anytime soon but if we are unable to get rid of offensive sports team nicknames, we will strike out.
Adam Dodek
If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way—who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites—it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking rapid cognition seriously--acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impression play in our lives--requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.
Malcolm Gladwell
I'm not white, no, but I'm just close enough that I could be, and just far enough that you know I'm not. I can check off a diversity box for you and I don't make you nervous - at least not on the surface. I'm the whole package!
Scaachi Koul
Mom talks about moving to Canada as though my father had requested she start wearing fun hats. "Why not try it?" she thought, instead of "This fucking lunatic wants me to go to a country made of ice and casual racism.
Scaachi Koul
I like being present in spaces where I am not welcome because you do not deserve to feel comfortable just because you're racist or sexist or small-minded.
Scaachi Koul
The Indian temperament is so excitable, you know.
Saul Bellow
The thing about the black market is, it’s racist. White children make useful slaves, too.
M.C. Humphreys
Multilate. Ha Ha Ha,' said Nusswan, avuncular and willing to pretend it was a clever joke. 'Its all relative. At the best of times, democracy is a see saw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion. You see, to make a democratic omelette you have to break a few democratic eggs. To fight fascism and other evil forces threatening our country, there is nothing wrong in taking strong measures. Especially when the foreign hand is always interfering to destabilize us. Did you know the CIA is trying to sabotage the Family Planning Programme?
Rohinton Mistry
Unlike exotic fruit or fancy cars, democracy is best if it is grown locally. It may take root in the common desire of the people who choose to adopt it, but it cannot be imposed from the outside.
Anna Porter
technologies come and go. Economic structures evolve and change. Society adjusts. But democratic basics persist in spite of the Tofflers, Gingrich and the chorus of corporate voices.(III - From Corporatism to Democracy)
John Ralston Saul
democracy is a see-saw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion
Rohinton Mistry
What makes the Arabs suitable candidates for democracy is their heritage as human beings, not their specific cultural or historical antecedents.
Gwynne Dyer
The problem with the politicians of both parties in the US is that neither of them have a real agenda except to feather their own nests. They both have their hands deep in corporate pockets. All the rest is sleight of hand and distraction to keep the public occupied with trivia, divided against each other, and thinking their vote matters.
Michael Hogan
This points to a central tension in our very idea and practice of democracy – it is not a simple appeal to the rule of the majority. It is also about respecting that the power of the people is limited by what’s fair to minorities, what’s reasonable, and by what’s legal and constitutional.
Bob Rae
The single greatest tool for making moral people commit atrocities is group affiliation. The single greatest tool for promoting global human rights and equality is to end group affiliation.
Heather Marsh
We are in a prison of our own minds holding our own chains around us. We create our oligarchs and fight for their right to oppress us.
Heather Marsh
[Stephen] Harper had said he would use all legal means, and what [John] Baird suggested was an option the prome minister was considering. If the governor general had refused his request, he could have replaced her with a more compliant one, making the case to the Queen that the people of Canada were opposed in great numbers to a coalition replacing his government.
Lawrence Martin
Bill C-9 was supposed to be a budget bill, but it came with innumerable measures that had little or nothing to do with the nation's finances. It was, as critics put it, the advance of the Harper agenda by stealth, yet another abuse of the democratic process. The bill was a behemoth. It was 904 pages, with 23 separate sections and 2,208 individual clauses....As a Reform MP, [Stephen Harper] .... said of one piece of legislation that 'the subject matter of the bill is so diverse that a single vote on the content would put members in conflict with their own principles.' The bill he referred to was 21 page long -- or 883 pages shorter than the one he was now putting before Parliament.
Lawrence Martin
Attempts to thwart or muzzle the media continued as well. At a conservative caucus meeting in Charlottetown in August 2007, journalists assembled in the lobby of the hotel, as they usually do at such gatherings, to talk to caucus members as they passed by. The [Prime Minister's Office] communications team, however, was not prepared to allow it. Taking their cue, or so it appeared, from a police state, they had the RCMP remove the reporters from the hotel.
Lawrence Martin
Corporations are not legal “persons” with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.
Kalle Lasn
So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn’t about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)
Nalo Hopkinson
Tell me half a cup’s worth of story and we’ll call it a night.
Kelley Armstrong
we compose our life in stories we tell ourselves
John Geddes
My TV show enraged people. I had prostitutes on, and I treated them like real people.... I was fired from Maclean's after I wrote a piece called 'Let's Stop Hoaxing The Kids About Sex'. Now I'm the 'beloved author,' the 'beloved historian of Canada,' an icon. I get standing ovations.... I never set out to be a patriot or a popular historian. I just liked storytelling. [interview promoting Marching as to War (2002)]
Pierre Berton
Infinite possibilities exist within the art of storytelling. To me, it is nothing less than the magic of creation.
Rai Aren
A well-spun tale can transport listeners away from their humdrum lives and return them with an enlarged sense of the world. (Peter Nimble)
Jonathan Auxier
Mrs Allan says that whenever we think of anything that is a trial to use we should also think of something nice that we can set over against it. If you are slightly too plump, you've got the dearest dimples; and if I have a freckled nose the shape of it is all right.
L.M. Montgomery
Don't apologize for doing what you thought was best. All you can ever do, is your best. Even if that doesn't work out, don't diminish your efforts. Don't diminish your intent. Don't apologize for being human. Don't take on guilt that isn't yours. We are all growing, learning and evolving. Take the lesson forward.
Akiroq Brost
In 1231, Pope Gregory ordered the Dominicans to take charge of papal courts and decisions and so prevent mob rule and guarantee that the accused received a fair trial and the right of defence. This was the foundation of the Inquisition, and it was a move to organize, control, and limit violence, disruption, and division. Of course, it often failed and even achieved the opposite of its stated and original purpose, but it's surprising how often in an age of casual and brutal violence a relative moderation and legality was achieved. Civil law was far harsher than canon law, demanding confiscation of a heretic's property and usually death, something the Church had tried to prevent for generations.
Michael Coren
Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same.
Saul Bellow
I don’t fundamentally understand why people give a shit about what other people put up their noses or what other people put in their veins or what other people breathe into their lungs. I mean I sort of care like if somebodies an addict it’s very destructive to people around that addict. It’s destructive to themselves. I’d like to get them help. I certainly support that which is to get that person help but, I don’t understand how people wake up and say I have to eradicate drug use across the land. “I gotta stick my nose into the business of what other people stick up their nose.” I just find that incomprehensible. I mean, is your life so vacant and so hysterical, so empty, so void of love, care and affection? I can go play with my daughter or I can go and obsessively try and get politicians to throw people in jail for doing things I don’t like. I can’t imagine why people would be choosing option “B” but, only because they don’t have anyone who loves them or, anyone they care about. They don’t have any rich, significant, important, hobbies, relationships, artistic pursuits or anything rich enough to keep them from obsessing about what other people do or bossing and bulling what other people do. This “stick your nose in other people’s business” Is so compulsive and epidemic to human society.
Stefan Molyneux
You’re breaking the fucking law, Cole… there is no right way to do this.
Danika Stone
To exist as an interpreter of the law, you first have to follow that law yourself. Law is the glue that holds society together. It's flawed, but absolute, and corruption only hinders its progress.
Rebecca McNutt
I had once repeated the experiment to reassure myself that this was so, and it was. Ashes to ashes; starch to sugar. A little window into the Creation
Alan Bradley