Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 55

The fires of nightthrough distance danceghosts who still know how to sing
Tamara Rendell
All summers take me back to the sea. There in the long eelgrass, like birds' eggs waiting to be hatched, my brothers and sister and I sit, grasses higher than our heads, arms and legs like thicker versions of the grass waving in the wind, looking up at the blue sky. My mother is gathering food for dinner: clams and mussels and the sharply salty greens that grow by the shore. It is warm enough to lie here in the little silty puddles like bathwater left in the tub after the plug has been pulled. It is the beginning of July and we have two months to live out the long, nurturing days, watching the geese and the saltwater swans and the tides as they are today, slipping out, out, out as the moon pulls the other three seasons far away wherever it takes things. Out past the planets, far away from Uranus and the edge of our solar system, into the brilliantly lit dark where the things we don't know about yet reside. Out past my childhood, out past the ghosts, out past the breakwater of the stars. Like the silvery lace curtains of my bedroom being drawn from my window, letting in light, so the moon gently pulls back the layers of the year, leaving the best part open and free. So summer comes to me.
Polly Horvath
As time passes in Heaven, the stars do not change places, not till the day when Zig changes the complete backdrop. I tell my students this is a metaphor for life; we go along thinking nothing will be different, till the day everything suddenly changes at once.
Neil Smith
Above and behind them the Dipper turned on its great handle as if to pour night itself out onto the dreaming continent and each of its seven stars gleamed from between the fitful clouds.
Paulette Jiles
If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.
Anne Michaels
Every time you look up at the stars, it’s like opening a door. You could be anyone, anywhere. You could be yourself at any moment in your life. You open that door and you realize you’re the same person under the same stars. Camping out in the backyard with your best friend, eleven years old. Sixteen, driving alone, stopping at the edge of the city, looking up at the same stars. Walking a wooded path, kissing in the moonlight, look up and you’re eleven again. Chasing cats in a tiny town, you’re eleven again, you’re sixteen again. You’re in a rowboat. You’re staring out the back of a car. Out here where the world begins and ends, it’s like nothing ever stops happening.
Bryan Lee O'Malley
Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life meunderstand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.
Peter Watts
Somewhere Dōgen wrote about the number of moments in the snap of a finger. I don’t remember the exact figure, only that it was large and seemed quite arbitrary and absurd, but I imagine that when I am in the cockpit of my plane, aiming the nose at the hull of an American battleship, every single one will be clear and pure and discernible. At the moment of my death, I look forward at last to being fully aware and alive.
Ruth Ozeki
Dignified in what she does, when she sings the smile that she brings to all of you unaware of what's to come, I said tell me what's to come.
Tegan Quin
...don't you realize a flawless profile means nothing when a mere smile drives me to desperation? Don't you covet that power?..
John Geddes
If sharks could smile, they'd smile like he was now.
Kathleen Peacock
When you are having a really crappy day, and life seems to be kicking your ass, try to force your self to laugh. If you can achieve a smile and a laugh, you can chase any demons away
L.F.Young
The mask's back in place. The heard-it-all smile. The seen-it-all eyes.
Moira Young
She smiled at me with such merriment of recognition, and such a yearning to be recognised in return, that you would think this was a moment granted to her when she was let out of the shadows for one day in a thousand.
Alice Munro
You said it was colorful. What changed?""I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just— I don't actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more.""So how do you know you still have them?" Pag asked.Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. "I know.""How?"I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered."I wake up smiling," I said.
Peter Watts
Smile for the camera, pretty little Sydney Tar Ponds.
Rebecca McNutt
Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia's pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living room window. The recovering terrorist--holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew--moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling.
Zsuzsi Gartner
The desire to be loved, to feel loved, is behind every diet, pill, surgery, and lie. It is behind each act of violence and every affair as well as each organized religion and every method of self-help.
Vironika Tugaleva
A bullet leaves evidence that a mortar doesn't.
Steven Galloway
It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were. Then the visible world exploded.
Steven Galloway
Violence and resistance are the only answer. Empire has to feel pain or it will never stop devouring you. It is only when a gun is put in a person’s face that anything changes. All empires are hungry cannibals...
Rawi Hage
Further, any way of life based on the importation of resources is also functionally based on violence, because if your way of life requires the importation of resources, trade will never be sufficiently reliable: if people in the next watershed over won't trade you for some necessary resource, you will take it, because you need it. So, to bring this to the present, we could all become enlightened, and the US military would still have to be huge: how else will they get access to the oil they need to run the economy, oil that just happens to lie under someone else's land? The point is that no matter what we think of the irredeemability of this culture's mass psychology or system of rewards, this culture–civilization–is also irredeemable on a purely functional level.
Aric McBay
The saying goes, if you love something, let it go. I always though it was better to just shoot the damn thing so it'd never go anywhere.
Karina Halle
We were vicious and violent but elegant and discreet. There was a dance to all of this, one that kept all things flowing in the right direction, a circle that ensured the smartest and brightest would stay on top, not the man with the most guns and the smallest dick.
Karina Halle
I slowly, deliberately began to work the blade into his throat. He squirmed and kicked and fought agains tme, but in his current state, I was stronger. His will to live was pathetic, just like he was. Eventually he stopped kicking. I kept cutting. When I was finally done, I was covered in sweat and only a few drops of blood on my shoes and pants. They'd come out in a good wash.I put his head into the garbage and pulled the bag out, making a knot at the end. I hoped it wouldn't leak through. Then I looked around the office. It was a mess before I came in, piles of paper and empty beer bottles scattered around. The addition of his blood and a headless corpse was barely noticeable.
Karina Halle
Religions, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion. They became ideologies; belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them they could make themselves “right” and others “wrong” and thus define their identity through their enemies, the “others”, the “nonbelievers” or “wrong believers” who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in the killing.
Eckhart Tolle
Her eyes widen and she shoves me back and then there's a space between us, enough to paralyze me with all of the things I could do to her next. I could raise my hand and hit her in the face or bring my knee into her stomach, take a fistful of her hair and rip it out of her skull. You don't get to do this when you're a girl, so when the opportunity for violence finally presents itself, I want all of it at once.
Courtney Summers
As part of the healing process, change your perception of yourself from “victim” to that of “advocate” and “survivor.
Don Easton
What are the final lessons learned? I came to the conclusion that the most powerful human motive by far is the striving for attachment to loved ones in perpetuity. Humans will do anything for this, including blowing themselves (and others) to pieces. I learned that tribalism is universal. It may start with the attachment to another (typically, the mother and disinterest in those who are not her), and it may be furthered by the division of in-group as those we recognize and out-group as the rest, but our capacity for symbolism established in- and outgroups in us all, and we view their actions completely differently. We need, if we are to survive, a sense both of humanity as a tribe and of humanity’s potential for radical violence. If we delude ourselves that we are the civilized entity we appear to be on the surface, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, only with more powerful and devastating weapons.
Donald G. Dutton
we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time.
Steven Pinker
People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It’s hard to follow the news without a mounting dread of terrorist attacks, a clash of civilizations, and the use of weapons of mass destruction. But we are apt to forget the dangers that filled the news a few decades ago, and to be blasé about the good fortune that so many of them have fizzled out.
Steven Pinker
One-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in tribal societies that had not been pacified by a colonial or national government, particularly if they had an exaggerated culture of manly honor.
Steven Pinker
The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd.
Steven Pinker
The 21st century has certainly seen the rape of women in wartime, but it has long been treated as an atrocious war crime, which most armies try to prevent and the rest deny and conceal. But for the heroes of the Iliad, female flesh was a legitimate spoil of war: women were to be enjoyed, monopolized, and disposed of at their pleasure. Menelaus launches the Trojan War when his wife, Helen, is abducted. Agamemnon brings disaster to the Greeks by refusing to return a sex slave to her father, and when he relents, he appropriates one belonging to Achilles, later compensating him with twenty-eight replacements. Achilles, for his part, offers this pithy description of his career: “I have spent many sleepless nights and bloody days in battle, fighting men for their women.”11 When Odysseus returns to his wife after twenty years away, he murders the men who courted her while everyone thought he was dead, and when he discovers that the men had consorted with the concubines of his household, he has his son execute the concubines too.
Steven Pinker
God, who is omnipotent, could have softened Pharaoh’s heart, but he hardens it instead, which gives him a reason to afflict every Egyptian with painful boils and other miseries before killing every one of their firstborn sons. (The word Passover alludes to the executioner angel’s passing over the households with Israelite firstborns.) God follows this massacre with another one when he drowns the Egyptian army as they pursue the Israelites across the Red Sea. The Israelites assemble at Mount Sinai and hear the Ten Commandments, the great moral code that outlaws engraved images and the coveting of livestock but gives a pass to slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide of neighboring tribes. The Israelites become impatient while waiting for Moses to return with an expanded set of laws, which will prescribe the death penalty for blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath. To pass the time, they worship a statue of a calf, for which the punishment turns out to be, you guessed it, death. Following orders from God, Moses and his brother Aaron kill three thousand of their companions.
Steven Pinker
But in Hebrew scripture David is not just the “sweet singer of Israel,” the chiseled poet who plays a harp and composes the Psalms. After he makes his name by killing Goliath, David recruits a gang of guerrillas, extorts wealth from his fellow citizens at swordpoint, and fights as a mercenary for the Philistines. These achievements make Saul jealous: the women in his court are singing, “Saul has killed by the thousands, but David by the tens of thousands.” So Saul plots to have him assassinated.19 David narrowly escapes before staging a successful coup. When David becomes king, he keeps up his hard-earned reputation for killing by the tens of thousands. After his general Joab “wasted the country of the children of Ammon,” David “brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes.” 20 Finally he manages to do something that God considers immoral: he orders a census. To punish David for this lapse, God kills seventy thousand of his citizens.
Steven Pinker
Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.
Steven Pinker
Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms.
Steven Pinker
I think it would be cool if we wore suits while we committed these violent acts of retribution. Not fancy suits. No. Cheap suits that we won't mind ruining. Then if we're caught by the police, well, think how amazing we'll look! All bloody and torn and grizzled.Plus, suits look official. They would add an air of credibility to our campaign of blood drenched disproportionate responses.
Joey Comeau
Whether it be in the sun, the rain, or the snow,You should always have fun, wherever you go.Think of all the amusing things you can do,To bring much laughter and happiness too.
Susanne Alexander-Heaton
Wherever you are, be all there." I have lived the runner, panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regrets, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.
Ann Voskamp
You are born to rule or to be ruled. It’s for you to decide which path to choose.
Vinita Kinra
The more challenges life deals us, the more scars experiences give us, the higher we go, the better we get.
Vinita Kinra
Chase a butterfly and you will discover the joys of wandering into uncharted trails.
Vinita Kinra
Imagine Himalayas without glaciers. Imagine 3 nuclear powers without water.
Vinita Kinra
They say, they own a piece of land. I say, you don’t even own your own body.
Vinita Kinra
Your success depends on how much fire of desire you have AND how much fuel of passion you feed it.
Vinita Kinra
River water and talent can’t be stopped forever.
Vinita Kinra
Trees are selfless, so all species thrive. If they were like humans, the world wouldn’t survive.
Vinita Kinra
Beauty of trees is not judged by shape, size and species, then why ours?
Vinita Kinra
Life and death are two banks of the same river. Time is the boat on which we travel from one to the other, over and over.
Vinita Kinra
Taj Mahal was built as a team; without a team, it was a far dream.
Vinita Kinra
A true friend is someone who knows what you want before you ask for it.
Vinita Kinra
Riots happen because rationale is eclipsed by revenge.
Vinita Kinra
Imagine a man without lungs. Imagine earth without Amazon rainforest.
Vinita Kinra
3 P’s are my soulmates: Pain, Prose and Poetry.
Vinita Kinra
Money is scarce; spend if you have to, not because you want to.
Vinita Kinra
When you feel big and powerful, stand before a mountain; when you feel small and weak, stand before an ant.
Vinita Kinra
Winners are those who defeat defeat.
Vinita Kinra
When you are in need, you are all alone indeed!
Vinita Kinra