Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 54

I remember that I did feel, starting my mini-tour, the resident anxiety you develop when you know you've been too lucky; at any moment, maybe next Tuesday afternoon, I would be stricken with something unbearable.
Carol Shields
As she stared at the restless pixels on the screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. It was a horrible, stilted, panicky sensation, hard to put into words.
Ruth Ozeki
It's simple,' Kat told them. 'You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety.
Margaret Atwood
And if I talk to him, I'll say something wrong, give something away. I can feel it coming, a betrayal of myself.
Margaret Atwood
He thought the library door would never open again, but that he would be left to live out the rest of his life rooted to the spot on the library carpet, afraid to move a muscle lest the house fall upon his shoulders. He deliberately shrugged them and shuffled his feel just to prove to himself that it could be done.
Mary Balogh
Knowing about God is crucially important for the living of our lives. As it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesmen to fly him to London, put him down without explanation in Trafalgar Square and leave him, as one who knew nothing of English or England, to fend for himself, so we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it .The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfold, as it were , with no sense of direction, and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.
J.I. Packer
I think you're crazy good at this survival stuff, Cary."His shoulders sag. He gives me a small, relieved smile and we start walking again, his step a little lighter than it was before. It feels strange to have that kind of power over someone."I mean, you're crazy good at it for a stoner who couldn't seem to get his shit together academically at all," I add.
Courtney Summers
Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious.
Yann Martel
Come aboard if your destination is oblivion - it should be our next stop.
Yann Martel
Successful hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy: the kill depends on how successfully a hunter inserts himself into the umwelt of his prey--even to the point of disguising himself as that animal and mimicking its behavior.
John Vaillant
Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me.
Robertson Davies
the secret of survival was to balance hope and despair
Rohinton Mistry
He would have died soon, but more painfully. Anyway, it was Urban Bloodshed Limitation. First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled.
Margaret Atwood
This isn't a game," he repeats. It's real. What you do here determines your survival. He pauses. "And the survival of every other person on this planet.I laugh.He doesn't. And that tells me he's either serious or seriously crazy. Please let him be crazy.
Eve Silver
She taught me that life goes on, and that I had a choice. To lament what I no longer had or be grateful for what remained.
Louise Penny
Surviving Is the only warWe can afford
Margaret Atwood
Anything could be endured, she had discovered, if she could only package the time into discrete little packets. She imagined taking the minutes, each one like a pellet, and wrapping them up - one minute, five minutes, fifteen, thirty. Once she had managed to survive a full hour, she could put the packets of time into a box, tie it with string, and push it down a conveyor belt. Just one more minute, one more hour, one more day.
Lynne Kutsukake
Sauve qui peut. To survivewe’d all turn thiefand rascal, or so says the fox,with her coat of an elegant scoundrel,her white knife of a smile,who knows just where she’s going:to steal somethingthat doesn’t belong to her -some chicken, or one more chance,or other life.
Margaret Atwood
There's nothing special about this place, he thinks. We all forget. Then we forget what we forgot. And that's how we survive.
Adam Sternbergh
He considered going for his hammer, which lay just out of reach, or maybe diving for Ganelon instead, since waking the warrior was probably his best hope of survival.
Nicholas Eames
The eye is always half-full.
Arthur Slade
There was no such thing as a fair fight. All vulnerabilities must be exploited.
Cary Caffrey
In the morning she found pieces of a birdchopped and scattered by the fanblood sprayed onto the mosquito net,its body leaving paths on the wallslike red snails that drifted down in lumps.She could imagine the featherswhile she had sleptfalling around herlike slow rain.
Michael Ondaatje
I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving. I was weeping because ....fill in the blank with whatever/whoever helped you survive... had left me so unceremoniously.
Yann Martel
Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.
Yann Martel
My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.
Rachel Hartman
Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.
Robertson Davies
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.
Yann Martel
When service is unto people, the bones can grow weary, the frustration deep. Because, agrees Dorothy Sayers, "whenever man is made the center of things, he becomes the storm-center of trouble. The moment you think of serving people, you begin to have a notion that other people owe you something for your pains...You will begin to bargain for reward, to angle for applause... When the eyes of the heart focus on God, and the hands on always washing the feet of Jesus alone - the bones, they sing joy and the work returns to it's purest state: eucharisteo. The work becomes worship, a liturgy of thankfulness. "The work we do is only our love for Jesus in action" writes Mother Theresa. "If we pray the work...if we do it to Jesus, if we do it for Jesus, if we do it with Jesus... that's what makes us content." Deep joy is always in the touching of Christ - in whatever skin He comes to us in. Page 194
Ann Voskamp
Service is one of life's great joys. It's a privilege to be in service. It's a great relief, a gift, to be faced with a job that you know absolutely you must do for the benefit of someone else. As long as you give yourself to it. You don't need to worry about anything but doing that job well, and the satisfaction, when you do, is very beautiful.
Claire Messud
Being a samurai is all about selfless service and if the lord abuses the servant, it is no longer a situation of service; it becomes the situation of a victim. It is never acceptable for a samurai to be a victim. It is never acceptable to allow a lord to abuse you or rob you of your dignity. In such a situation, it is acceptable to walk away.
Alexei Maxim Russell
Happy to be here, proud to serve.
Keith Allan Moore
The service [Jesus] gave to humanity was given even when we least merited that sacrifice. There is a joy in service that transcends emotional temporariness.
Ravi Zacharias
Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. Some economists are so attached to the notion of growth that they can't let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a time of "negative growth".
Eckhart Tolle
Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.
William Gibson
Thinking he knows can be a trap. An ex-professor once told him he had a diamond-hard intellect and he’d been flattered at the time. Now he considers the nature of diamonds. Although sharp and glittering and useful for cutting glass, they shine with reflected light only. They’re no use at all in the dark
Margaret Atwood
How you are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you are. The ego's sense of self-worth is in most cases bound up with the worth you have in the eyes of others.
Eckhart Tolle
the ego likes to emphasize the 'otherness' of others
Eckhart Tolle
What keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more and keep buying and consuming.
Eckhart Tolle
You can only be in a state of non-reaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
Eckhart Tolle
Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language, and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with gauges and levers operated by a user — the self, the soul, the ghost, the person, the “me.” But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just another network of brain systems. [C]ognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. The brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cingulate cortex, which can push the buttons of behavior and override habits and urges. But those systems are gadgets with specific quirks and limitations; they are not implementations of the rational free agent traditionally identified with the soul or the self.
Steven Pinker
Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment. It is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego.
Eckhart Tolle
Arguments should always be held in private. Audiences inflate the ego.
L.J Vanier
If we are to grow in love, the prisons of our egoism must be unlocked. This implies suffering, constant effort and repeated choices.
Jean Vanier
She watched with morbid fascination as they gathered at the stumps at the ends of the man's wrists, the old scar tissue the only place on him unclaimed by Fener, but the paths the sprites took to those stumps touched not a single tattooed line. The flies dance a dance of avoidance - but for all that, they were eager to dance.
Steven Erikson
It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, 'Read,' but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, 'Don't read, don't think, just write,' and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think 'There must be something else people do,' you won't quite be able to quit.
Alice Munro
My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.
Elon Musk
...when you look at the stars, you should tremble - only dullards have become callous to this frisson ...
John Geddes
....my sacred landscape is the foothills of the stars - I go there often to sleep ...
John Geddes
...once I saw you in moonlight and I can tell you - the silvery dust of the stars doesn't shimmer like you...
John Geddes
...you ask me why I compare you to stars - it's simple - that's where your goddess has fled...
John Geddes
...I can’t grasp the stars, but I love them – in the same way, I love you...
John Geddes
...I remember your profile in darkness outlined by stars ...
John Geddes
I am in love with the stars of night - I have made them audible...
John Geddes
the fragrance of pine resin is frankincense poured out—a balm of stars and snow and moonlit nights
John Geddes
The sky pulsed with stars. Some people say it makes them lonesome when they stare up at the night sky. I can't imagine why. There's no shortage of company. By now there's not a constellation I can't name. Orion. Lupus. Serpens. Hercules. Draco. My father taught me all of their stories. So when I look up I see a galaxy of adventures and heroes and villains, all jostling together and trying to outdo one another, and I sometimes want to tell them to hush up and not distract me with their chatter. I've glimpsed all the stars ever discovered by astronomers, and plenty that haven't been.
Kenneth Oppel
And what is I was only supposed to burn for a certain amount of time?" I whispered. "What if I was only meant to shine for a while?""Then you truly don't know what stars are meant to do."I looked at him in wonder."They are meant to give us hope in the face of infinity".
Karina Halle
The velvet tapestry of the night curved from horizon to horizon, flecked with thousands of tiny stars. There seemed all the more of them, for as well as filling the sky, they shimmered in an elegant ballet on the waves, the sea itself giving them life.
Mary-Jean Harris
In cities it is useless to look at the stars or to describe them, worship them, or seek direction from them. When lost, one should follow the tracks of the camels.
Rawi Hage
With her right index finger she slowly spells words on Grace's skin.Don't let me go crazy.The moon is pale and vast. The stars so sharp they almost hurt.
Helen Humphreys