Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 57

I Am excited, this is a new day and one I have never experienced nor will again. What fantabulous miracles will show up today!
Lee Pryke
Our minds thirst for anything that reminds us of the deepest wisdom of the soul.
Vironika Tugaleva
Hurry wounds a questioning soul.
Sarah Bessey
Philip wooed me with all the patience of someone trying to coax a half-wild animal into the house and, like many a stray, I found myself domesticated before I thought to resist.
Kelley Armstrong
Dawn appears when it appears.
Jared Brock
She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.
Mavis Gallant
The work that God does in us when we wait is usually more important than the thing for which we wait!
Erwin W. Lutzer
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
Margaret Atwood
...I got to love solitude - to see the Moon rise and set - I had time to watch it trace the window square across the wall in silent grace...
John Geddes
I’ve always been a sort of self-imposed outsider, not a geeky outsider or a snobby outsider but, I just have a natural desire to live on the fringe. I’m not like a weirdo with a trench-coat but I just prefer to be alone or minimally surrounded by people.
Sara Quin
you are a ring tone on the phone I didn’t answer
John Geddes
you know the way of the wind in the night—the desolate alleys my soul takes
John Geddes
the romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity.
Spencer Gordon
Any human companionship, even the dearest and most perfect, would have been alien to her then. She was sufficient unto herself, needing not love nor comradeship nor any human emotion to round out her felicity. Such moments come rarely in any life, but when they do come they are inexpressibly wonderful - as if the finite were for a second infinity - as if humanity were for a space uplifted into divinity - as if all ugliness had vanished, leaving only flawless beauty.
L.M. Montgomery
She has always said that talking makes everyone feel better. He says talking is the equivalent of grooming. The tongue and fingers are governed by the same parts of the brain. He marvels at how close they can be some nights on the phone and how words really are the equal of touch. Bakelite pressed hard against his ear.She says it's not just the freedom from him and from their daughter. I feel some sort of opening. I saw things so clearly today.He thinks about the solitary figure in every religion, the monks, saints and shamans in every tradition who walk out into wilderness on their own and find revelation.It's what solitude does to a social animal he says.People talk of recognizing something greater than themselves when they're alone because we finally have to realize how helpless we are as individuals. There's a freedom, a sense of wonder in feeling for a moment that we don't have to please anyone or adjust to the needs of others. And there's a fear in realizing how small we are, how much those distant others normally insulate us from seeing the limits of our mostly incompetent bodies. When we're on our own we seek solutions and speculate and fictionalize because that's what we do when we're confronted with survival. That's revelation.Maybe she says, I'm just saying I'd like to eat less meat. We could have fish.
Colin McAdam
Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.
Eleanor Catton
I took you to that windy hill where stars on every side fall away
John J. Geddes
Let's just enjoy it for ourselves. Dawn is such a private hour, don't you think? Such a solitary hour. One always hears that said of midnight, but I think of midnight as remarkably companionable—everyone together, sleeping in the dark.''I am afraid I am interrupting your solitude,' Anna
Eleanor Catton
I covet solitude and storms…and rain, with its geography of dark silence and distance
John J. Geddes
I need to be alone. After a full day of talking, smiling, listening, showing, nodding, translating, I want to be alone. I want simply to come home, close the door, and sit in silence, gathering up the bits of myself that have come loose. I want to think, or not think. I want to rest.
Jamie Zeppa
fallin lovewith your solitude
Rupi Kaur
We habitually compare ourselves to others to a debilitating degree, believing our successes can only be captured by how much we've outpaced someone else. We deal in acceptable ideas. We disregard our own capabilities. We waste a lot of time and emotion on what everyone else is doing well or badly, when we should be investing in and celebrating ourselves. And sometimes we simply forget that we like our own company, or that we love things for our own, deeply personal, individualistic reasons.In short, we forget ourselves, and how to be alone.
Stacey May Fowles
I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.
Saul Bellow
I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.
Alice Munro
Earth does not need you, you need the earth. To save yourself, save the earth.
Vinita Kinra
This is an organic religion. A religion of the people from heart to heart; a faith that finds the presence of the Divine within life, and nature, and ourselves. We don't have teachers and books because we are our own teachers, and our book is the sacred book of the Earth. We believe that we can connect with the God and Goddess and hear their voices, receive their inspiration directly and take responsibility for our own actions, without the intermediary of a pope or rabbi. We have a loose set of beliefs and morals and a ritual structure that is common to all Wiccans, but there is room for creativity and deep mystical experiences. This is a faith with roots as old as the earth. --Meri Fowler
Arin Murphy-Hiscock
There is earth below your earth, a deep room wheregas and oil, rock and stone, circulate like slow bloodthrough a body.
Mathew Henderson
Again Sam’s genitals became rock, and this astonished him as much as anything. Through Franz, he was becoming the stone Earth; the final border separating him from the planet was disappearing. And this transformation to rock was fuelled by desire, the most ephemeral thing on Earth.
Barry Webster
The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more? How many people were even left now?
Emily St. John Mandel
The prints shop manager, a balding man of about thirty years old, dressed in a plaid work shirt and faded jeans, looked very shocked when he saw the headline text. “Sydney Tar Ponds, Is It As Dangerous As People Say? Well,” he exclaimed, glancing at the front photo, which featured the Sydney Steel Corporation, along with its plumes of orange smog. “You know, most people your age are really against that mill, as if it’s a disease. We have university students protesting every few weeks or so… strangely enough, the ones who have parents who rely on that steel mill to pay the bills.”“What about the pollution?” Wendy questioned, almost accusingly, as if it was his fault. “What if dangerous chemicals are in the environment?”“Hey kid, I don’t even work at the mill, never have, but my father, my uncle, their father, cousins, all worked there,” the prints shop man argued, placing the newspapers in a cardboard box and taping it shut. “When it comes down to all that ‘go green’ crap, you have to ask yourself, is it worth risking a person’s income, their job, their family… their life? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but these newspapers might have a point.
Rebecca McNutt
The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, "Enough!" The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement.
Saul Bellow
Change is never easy, and it often creates discord, but when people come together for the good of humanity and the Earth, we can accomplish great things.
David Suzuki
Live today as if there will be many tomorrows!
Lorii Myers
Live. For Now. For the time being.
Ruth Ozeki
Live is meaningful only if you gave it a meaning.
T. Harv Eker
And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but ...alive.
Mary Balogh
Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.
Mary Balogh
He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.
Mary Balogh
My longings, my hopes, my dreams, and my every effort has been to live for Him who rescued me, to study for Him who gave me this mind, to serve Him who fashioned my will, and to speak for Him who gave me a voice.
Ravi Zacharias
‎All my stupid little thoughts beget stupid little thoughts, rampantly speculating every possible outcome of every possible situation until they're all done to death and none of them could ever be true.
Bryan Lee O'Malley
By realizing the spiritual power of Thought, versus getting into the content of thought, you will make your reality a mentally healthier one
Elsie Spittle
I don't know" is not confusion. Confusion is "I don't know, but I should know" or "I don't know, but I need to know." When you fully accept that you don't know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.
Eckhart Tolle
One thought follows on the other, they are not distinct objects with clear boundaries; rather, one thought anticipates the next and thereby contains it. The thought that comes afterward contains the memory or trace of the former. Thus, the movement of thought within the mind requires a mathematics of implicate forms.
F. David Peat
Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought.
Iain Reid
Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.
Steven Pinker
What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them.
Saul Bellow
That’s what money will buy you, in America,” Brown had said, firmly. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.
William Gibson
Unfortunately for him he looked more like an innocent man on America’s terror watch-list rather than a gallant Viking possessing all the benefits of modernity. More like a villain in a Western fairy tale with his slicked-bouffant obsidian hair rather than the long sun-like curls that all great saviors of the poor have been obliged to possess. I squinted to the side towards him for a second and he caught my gaze almost immediately; his inky irises were comfortable enough to hold my stare indefinitely, his pupils seemed entirely ravenous as opposed to the feminist preferred oceanic turquoise, which for them is a physical demarcation of emotional sensitivity. He seemed like an uncanny bad guy any which way I looked at him, except of course, by his actions thus far…
Bruce Crown
Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.
Saul Bellow
How simple the American narrative. Suppose you have two hands. The American political system will cut off both hands. You’ll then hear that those with one hand will be along the upper class and those with two will be part of the elite few. Then politicians will come along and tell you their plan for giving each American two hands. The people will buy into this and fight the disillusioned in favor of the politician. They are never for themselves and the politicians are only for themselves so no one is for the people.
Bruce Crown
I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did it, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult. It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics at the time. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe, the entire government gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
Margaret Atwood
She writes like an angel, it says of Laura on the back of one of the editions of The Blind Assassin. An American edition, as I recall, with gold scrollwork on the cover: they set a lot of store by angels in those parts. In point of fact angels don't write much. They record sins and the names of the dammed and the saved, or they appear as disembodied hands and scribble warnings on walls. Or they deliver messages, few of which are good news: God be with you is not an unmixed blessing.
Margaret Atwood
America's over. Get out while you still can.
J.M. Porup
Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from.
Margaret Atwood
Americans see democracy as a remedy for all ills-to be taken three times daily like prescription medicine. It works for them. Ergo - it should work for the world. What America naïvely forgets is that for democracy to function, most of a populace must have something personally that is worth preserving.
Arthur Hailey
I could hold you prisoner here for the rest of the day and list everything I love about you, but that’s only half of it,” he explained, turning toward me. “The other half is something I can’t put into words. Something I don’t think I’ll ever be able to. It’s something that ties me to you, and you to me. Call it chemistry, call it fate, call it whatever you want. All I know is that I’m yours just as much as you’re mine, Luce. That’s the surest thing I’ve ever known.
Nicole Williams
Heaven is freakin' not ready for me!" - seven-time cancer survivor Dionne Warner in Never Leave Your Wingman
Deana J. Driver
You're actually each other's wingman. You never leave your partner vulnerable." - Graham Warner, husband of fun-loving seven-time cancer survivor Dionne Warner
Deana J. Driver
I didn’t say a word. He wouldn’t be using oxygen. K2 is more dangerous than Everest.
Susan Oakey-Baker
It should never be your job to pick up the pieces of a broken man or to housebreak one. There are far better things you can do with your time.
Alice Walsh