Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 52

Creatures are not entitled to register complaints about their Creator.
J.I. Packer
Your mind is the paintbrush, the earth is your easel. Create your masterpeice
L.J Vanier
Winning the Origins Lottery Nontheistic models adhere to a central premise that humans arose by strictly natural unguided steps from a bacterial life-form that sprang into being 3.8 billion years ago. Famed evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, an advocate for the hypothesis that natural selection and mutations can efficiently generate distinctly different species, nevertheless calculated the probability that humans (or a similarly intelligent species) arose from single-celled organisms as a possibility so small (10-1,000,000) that it might as well be zero (roughly equivalent to the likelihood of winning the California lottery 150,000 consecutive times with the purchase of just one ticket each time).2 He and other evolutionary biologists agree that natural selection and mutations could have yielded any of a virtually infinite number of other outcomes. Astrophysicists Brandon Carter, John Barrow, and Frank Tipler produced an even smaller probability.
Hugh Ross
Putting in effort is like riding a bicycle on train tracks, you will get to where you want to go but you will feel every bump along the way.
Davis Levy
A woman stood in front of her with the peculiar poise that comes before the discovery of age and after the loss of innocence.
Donald Kingsbury
To be truly stylish (as opposed to merely "in style", which is the opposite) is to be unabashedly one's self, without reference to the fashions and demands of a sweltering crowd.
Michael Harris
Envy comes from people’s ignorance of, or lack of belief, in their own gifts.
Jean Vanier
Why should I care what other people think of me? I am who I am. And who I wanna be.
Avril Lavigne
The secret of enlightenment is the absolute, unequivocal conviction that it exists.What does that mean? It means you have discovered an unshakable confidence in the fact of nonduality—in the perennial mystical revelation that IT IS . . . and I AM THAT. A confidence in that which can never be seen or known is the very ground of the enlightened state. Being is ungraspable, it’s unknowable, it’s ever elusive, and yet it is the only place you can find true confidence in life. Why? Because it is the very source of life itself.The conscious experience of Being, which is what enlightenment is, has always been the ultimate answer to the most fundamental spiritual questions: Who am I? and Why am I here? Those who have tasted enlightened awareness find that in that experience, any trace of existential doubt and all the questions that go along with it instantaneously disappear. It’s not even that they are answered, but rather, the questions lose their meaning. When you locate the nonrelative, or absolute, nature of consciousness in the depths of your own self, it is experienced as a clarity that is empty of content; a weightiness that is full of nothing in particular; a profound knowing that dissolves all questions. In that questionless state, you find yourself profoundly rooted and radically free, supported by an absolute confidence in the knowing of no-thing that changes everything. The experience of that empty ground is the answer—the one answer that always liberates each and every one of us. You simply know, unequivocally, before thought, that I am. That’s the only answer: I AM. There is no why.
Andrew Cohen
You’ll get lost and then you’ll find it.
Mark Darrah
...the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.
Eckhart Tolle
...at dawn, the grains of sleep turn to floating black spots, then out of focus the world tilts, and the cat scratches at the door...
John Geddes
I used to be free spirited, now I'm just free of sleep. I got a burning passion in my throat. I got a burning passion inside me.
Tegan Quin
Our dreams are little stories or puzzles that we must solve to be free, Sebastian said. He was reading out loud from Wilson's notebook. My dream is me offering me a solution to the conundrum of my life. My dream is me offering me something that I need and my responsibility to myself is to try to understand what it means. Our dreams are a thin curtain between survival and extinction.
Miriam Toews
But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep.
Margaret Atwood
The sun was up, the room already too warm. Light filtered in through the net curtains, hanging suspended in the air, sediment in a pond. My head felt like a sack of pulp. Still in my nightgown, damp from some fright I'd pushed aside like foliage, I pulled myself up and out of my tangled bed, then forced myself through the usual dawn rituals - the ceremonies we perform to make ourselves look sane and acceptable to other people. The hair must be smoothed down after whatever apparitions have made it stand on end during the night, the expression of staring disbelief washed from the eyes. The teeth brushed, such as they are. God knows what bones I'd been gnawing in my sleep.
Margaret Atwood
So he slips his head off of Jeff's shoulder and slides out from under Evan's Armand shuffles down to the bottom of the bed. It doesn't have a lot of dignity this part of their sleeping arrangement. He's complained about this before but Jeff just nodded, and Evan had kissed the back of his neck, and they'd both snuggled in a little tighter, pinning him in the middle even more effectively than before.
Kate Sherwood
One of the most frequent sins of omission is the failure to get adequate rest.
James MacDonald
A hand touched my shoulder, shaking me. I was back on the bus. It was dark and warm and I just wanted to sleep, but Chloe kept shaking my sho
Kelley Armstrong
Adulthood’s full of ghosts... High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.
Emily St. John Mandel
The noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep.
Saul Bellow
Dreams are just lies that we tell ourselves while we're asleep.
Rebecca McNutt
One afternoon, disgusted, bravo, you fall asleep.
Tim Lilburn
I wish I didn't have to think about you. You wanted to impress me; well, I'm not impressed, I'm disgusted...You wanted to make damn good and sure I'd never be able to turn over in bed again without feeling that body beside me, not there but tangible, like a leg that's been cut off. Gone but the place still hurts.
Margaret Atwood
Good night, belovedest. Your sleep will be sweet if there is any influences in the wishes of your own.
L.M. Montgomery
The life you have built around you is a reflection of what is within you. If you don't like what you see, go inside.
L.J Vanier
Capturing moments other may never get to experience.
Ann Edall-Robson
The question is not why should we change but rather what sort of death wish are we promoting by refusing to change?
William Badke
Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can get a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays you on time and doesn't cheat or abuse you, then it's in your best interest to show up consistently from year to year.
Ruth Ozeki
I am a teacher. I should be giving tests, not taking them.
Allan Dare Pearce
I am not a teacher in my heart," she said. "I am a doer, and all these little shitheads in front of me are do-nothings. There is racism in the world and they acknowledge it, but they sit in class listening to bullshit professors. Give me a bricklayer with a racist attitude. It is just more honest.
Allan Dare Pearce
To fit the individual to live and to function in the institutional life of his day.
Max Braithwaite
Aboriginal Okinawan Karate was traditionally taught in modest home Dojos, in small informal groups (sole purpose of teachings revolved around life preservation), in A closely tied supportive environment; unlike main island modern Japanese version with rivalry and competition, instructed in large groups belonging to even larger organizations with pseudo-militaristic hierarchy
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall (which will teach him not to fall again) when a word from you would keep him on his feet but ignorant of an important danger, is one of the tasks of the teacher that calls for special energy, because holding in is more demanding than crying out.
Robertson Davies
The way I see Jesus has not changed much at all since I was a child, but my imprisonment and all that followed made me love Him even more. His being the Son of God makes sense to me, because I believe God to be loving, just, forgiving, and merciful. I also believe that He respects free will. After all, He has given it to us so that we can choose to love or hate Him, do good or evil. But is it fair for a loving God to sit on His throne in Heaven and let us struggle and suffer on our own? Would any good father abandon His children this way? It makes perfect sense to me that God decided to come among us, live like us, and die a horribly painful death after being tortured. This is a God I can love with all my heart. A God who sets an example. A God who has bled and whose heart has been broken. This is who Jesus is to me. I don't pretend that I understand the Holy Trinity. But I understand love and sacrifice. I understand faithfulness.
Marina Nemat
We sacrifice our potential because we do not know that we are pure potential.
Vironika Tugaleva
I felt the back of my neck crawl. The crawling reached around to the corners of my jaw, then up to my temple, and across my cheeks.I reached up to touch it. Splinters, small fingers, hooks. Scraping at my fingertips, gouging. Slowly reaching for my eyes, reaching for my remaining flesh. Tiny, like the legs of spiders, pincers, fish hooks, they stabbed and set themselves into the flesh that remained, around my mouth, near my eyes, at my forehead. Then they stopped. Waited.Asking. Offering. A deal with the devil, metaphorically speaking.Give up your face if you truly want wings. Give up your eyes. I could hear the dragon screech, not all that far away. This crisis I faced was removed from a very large, very real crisis that threatened people and Others I cared a great deal about.Do it, and you can fly. Fly, and you might be able to do something to save them.
Wildbow
Given the choice between one lifetime spent with you or a thousand without, I will always choose you.
Danielle L. Jensen
She’s contemplative; I can feel the air around her thick with her thoughts. “No,” she says at last, “I want to believe you’re being sincere but I know you’re not. So I say no, because even if I allow myself to fantasize a little about our lives in a cabin on the beach, I still find myself being left by you. There’s almost no scenario I can think of where we live happily ever after.”“There could be,” I tell her and mean it at the moment. Maybe mean it for longer. Her fingers stop moving and she sighs. I open my eyes and she’s staring down at me. The lights have come on around the parking lot and one of them shines directly into her face. She angelic, a neon seraphim under the brilliant skies of the spring. I can see us on our boat, eating our hand picked clams on the fire behind our place. I can see it so vividly I’m almost sure it’s happened.
Jaden Wilkes
No matter how damaged we were by our lives, we are whole when we are together
Jaden Wilkes
She'd always had a hankering for sitting quietly in dark, confined spaces.
Robert Beatty
I’m pretty sure there are some things in the dark that we’re not meant to see.
Karina Halle
Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave -The water below is as dark as the grave,And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat -It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat
Margaret Atwood
I love those dark moments in Peanuts. I love that they're in there, that Charles Schulz put the sad lonely bits of himself into the comic. I love the silliness too, the dancing Snoopy strips. The little boy Rerun drawing "basement" comics about Tarzan fighting Daffy Duck in a helicopter. Those are the bits that keep me reading. The funny parts! The fun parts. The silly bits that don't make any sense. And when I get to the sad lonely Peppermint Patty standing in a field wondering why nobody shook hands and said "good game," well, it works because that's not all she was. I try to think that way about everything. That's the kind of person I want to be.
Joey Comeau
Murderous thieves make their home here." She failed to keep the tremor from her voice. "Absolutely," Jonas replied."Dangerous animals too.""Without a doubt."She slanted a look toward him. "Perfect place for you."He repressed a snort. "Oh, such compliments, your highness. You're going to make me blush.
Morgan Rhodes
I do not admire greatness that has no substance.
Mary Balogh
You may be thinking that your company has a human resources person who will keep you out of trouble. This is a dangerous misconception. Whether your company has a massive Human Resources Department with hundreds of representatives or a small office with just a single representative, these HR reps are not your advocates. They work for the company, not for you.
Johanna Harris
One cannot take a coward on dangerous missions or trust one’s fortune to a fool. How then are cowards and fools to be employed?
Donald Kingsbury
Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.
Naomi Klein
It was his vocation to pleasure as many women as possible, in pursuit of his own pleasure. It was as close to a job as he got.
Rosanna Leo
I want to make a difference. But get a job? I worry that will make the ordinary, like everybody else.
Claire Messud
I think it is a duty I owe to my profession and to my sex to show that a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon it merely because she marries. I cannot conceive how women's colleges, inviting and encouraging women to enter professions can be justly founded or maintained denying such a prin
Harriet Brooks
When my father was 17, he went to Montreal and found these submarine sandwich shops that were really successful, and weren't in Toronto [his home town]. So he went to my grandparents and said: "Look, you have to give me the seed money to open up one of these places. We'll make a fortune. They've got lines going round the block. There's nothing like that here." And my grandfather's response was: "Look, I'm sure these sandwiches are really good, and if we scraped the money together we could make a lot of money and your mother and I would be really proud of you, but you need to find something that has *magic* in it for you." It was off of that conversation that my father went to college on a music scholarship, started a film club and became one of the most successful directors of all time.
Jason Reitman
In the meantime, I’ll get a job. I’ll pay my own way.” “A job?” “Mmm, yeah. It’s that thing people do to make money.
Kelley Armstrong
...true love is my religion...
John Geddes
I never loved anyone else and never desired to. She was my companion, my lover, and my teacher.
Nick Bantock
The idea that love is something magical, almost supernatural, in your heart, that has nothing to do with the day-to-day encounters with a real person--- that understanding of love has probably created more unhappiness and ruined more marriages than just about anything.Love is what happens between people living their lives together, becoming close through contact and actual partnership and it's what survives through difficulties and imperfections. An idealized, imagined, faraway person in your heart---that's not love. That's a daydream.
Misha Glouberman
You can be taught to write – you can’t be taught to be an artist
John Geddes
yes, writing is mostly a dream, but angels visit in dreams
John Geddes
Young Arab men are not going to walk away from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee. They will walk away when they can devote themselves to a some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime.
David Brooks