Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 60

Where did the stereotypical image of the reclusive author in a bathrobe and slippers, indulging in vices and spending hours before a typewriter, even come from? I don't know about you, but most writers don't have the luxury of doing any of this. Otherwise we'd have no life experience and nothing to write about, anyway.
Rebecca McNutt
What are the chances that of all 1.59629 quadrillion square feet of physical land on planet Earth, three major world religions are literally fighting over one single rock?
Jared Brock
A world that becomes more Muslim becomes less everything else. First it’s Jews, already abandoning France. Then it’s homosexuals, already under siege from gay-bashing in Amsterdam, ‘the most tolerant city in Europe’. Then it’s uncovered women, targetted for rape in Oslo. And if you don’t any longer have any Jews or (officially) any gays or (increasingly) uncovered women, there are always just Christians in general, from Nigeria to Egypt to Pakistan. More space for Islam means less space for everything else, and in the end for you.
Mark Steyn
I was not always a Muslim, but once I was led into the absorption of prayer and the mysteries of the Qur’an, something troubled in me became still.
Camilla Gibb
The stupid girl thinks Muslim is a language.
Jill Ciment
When liberals equate criticizing Islamic doctrine with anti-Muslim bigotry, it leaves a vacuum that is too frequently filled by genuine right-wing anti-Muslim bigots who are even more disagreeable. Who gets stuck in the middle? Ex-Muslims.
Ali A. Rizvi
When Allah (swt) decrees that a door in your life is to be opened, no matter how hard you try to close it, no matter how far you run away from it, it will remain open until you walk through. When Allah (swt) decrees that a door is to be closed, no matter how many times you knock on that door, try to break it down, or cry on your knees in front of it, begging it to open again, it will never be opened. Grieve in front of that closed door if you must. Stand there for a time and look at it. Hold your hands over your heart and press down to calm it's quickened pained rhythm. Then know- know beyond the shadow of a doubt, know in your heart of hearts- that when you trust Allah and move forward, he will open a more beautiful door for you. You will walk through it and perhaps you will even praise him for having closed the past door you loved so much. He is Al-Fattah, the Opener. May the doors He opens for us always lead us back to him.
Asmaa Hussein
Her Majesty's government is engaging not merely in Orwellian Newspeak but in self-defeating Orwellian Newspeak. The broader message it sends is that ours is a weak culture so unconfident and insecure that if you bomb us and kill us our first urge is to find a way to flatter and apologize to you.
Mark Steyn
Most of the church landscape in my lifetime has been heavily invested in trying to do something for Jerry or Sherri or some other icon of unchurchness. The problem is that they have been only about themselves from the moment they could wail for their mothers, and the decision to give them at church what they can find in any self-help book appears now as a choice to abandon the One in whose honor the church gathers. What they need is to be set free from themselves with finality and to be lost in the awesome wonder of the manifest presence of God. It was never God’s desire that He would sit on the sideline and watch us frantically devise impressive ways to reach people or simply hold the line on orthodoxy as though faithfulness can exist in a vacuum apart from fruitfulness. God is the Matter of first importance! Can you say that about your current weekly encounter with church?
James MacDonald
Whatever else in the Bible catches your eye, do not let it distract you from Him.
J.I. Packer
Excuses fall silent behind self-control, focus, and direction.
Lorii Myers
Set aside your repertoire of objections and own 100 percent of your focus.
Lorii Myers
Own 100 percent of your focus. The most challenging of endurance drills will bring you to a level of optimal mental and physical performance.
Lorii Myers
A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.
David Brooks
Find your focus by seeking all that is good in your life.
Lorii Myers
Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus.
Ann Voskamp
...you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being.
Brian Tracy
My name is Lake Suck and this is my manifesto. I swear to be myself. To think for myself. I will not be led by social conventions. I will make my own way through the world. I will live on my own terms without conforming to society's expectations of who they think I should be, I will be the visible minority.By being myself, I will help to save the world. I swear to always look, listen, learn, think, ask, act, and speak for myself.
Cecil Castellucci
-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?I said nothing.-Deny it,damn you!
Michael Ondaatje
I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.
Michael Ondaatje
Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,Such questions can turn me to ashes.
Zoë S. Roy
You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can - buy me or not - but this is who I am as a writer.
David Morrell
During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instance of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.
David Rakoff
...if you've got writer's block, you aren't empty - maybe it's just like Twitter - overwhelmed, and loading seems to be taking a while...
John Geddes
...when you're a writer, you become deeper and more uniquely distinct, the more you go inside yourself...
John Geddes
...If I ever got sloppy and maudlin, it would be for the streets of my childhood—but no self- respecting writer should ever eulogize a slum...
John Geddes
...each person is required to ask, 'what is my authority?' - on what do you base your decisions? if it's yourself, then you are without excuse...
John Geddes
...what makes a writer a prophet is his ability to speak truth...
John Geddes
...authority is the unmistakeable tone in the voice of a true writer...
John Geddes
I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it….By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you….Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.
Margaret Atwood
On every page, confidence fights with self-doubt. Every sentence is an act of faith. Why would anybody want to do it?
David Morrell
Writers get to construct a magical world that readers can visit in thought and extend their stay with imagination.
Sandra Alex
You write once and you can call yourself a writer, but it takes three novels before you can call yourself a novelist. The first two could have just been lucky. One day, I will finish my third, and one day, I will be a novelist.
Michael Kroft
No matter how good it is, your book will not sell itself.
Elinor Florence
See my blog at crossedeyesanddottedtees.wordpress.com for more of my writing.
Ellie Presner
A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant.
Margaret Atwood
The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.
Alberto Manguel
Nowadays 'invisibility' was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself.
Emma Donoghue
Mid-range, androgynous voice. I first thought that Solaris was a guy. Then a girl. Maybe. Then I gave up trying to figure out which. It would become obvious at some point, or not.
Nalo Hopkinson
I have learned a great deal from other Witches, Wiccans, Odinists, Voodoo and Hoodou practitioners, Druids and many others who consider themselves Pagan. The one common thread is that every single person has been nonjudgmental. Isn't this what it's all about, acceptance? Are we not here to design our own spiritual path? --Icinia
Arin Murphy-Hiscock
Everything changes. The leaves, the weather, the colour of your hair, the texture of your skin. The feelings you have today - whether they kill you or enthrall you - won’t be the same tomorrow, so let go. Celebrate. Enjoy. Nothing lasts, except your decision to celebrate everything, everyone, for the beauty that is there within each moment, each smile, each impermanent flicker of infinity.
Vironika Tugaleva
The Key to Abundance is Acceptance. The more you expect the less you accept.
L.J Vanier
Enjoy things for what they are, when they are, in the moment.
Akiroq Brost
We all encounter things that we can't perhaps change and that's OK because surely there are many other things that we can.
Akiroq Brost
Don’t just to avoid criticism. If you do nothing, you will be nothing. If you do only the parts you really love, you will also be nothing. It takes what it takes. It takes all of it. Own it, accept it, embrace it and do it. Want all of what you want!
Akiroq Brost
AUNT SHADIE:I see you - and don't worry, you're not white.ROSE:I'm pretty sure I'm white. I'm English.AUNT SHADIE:White is blindness - it has nothing to do with the colour of your skin.
Marie Clements
We have laws about human rights in place for a reason and even if those laws are so often not enforced BY the law, these laws teach us our rights as human beings. I was shocked when I first discovered them, but at the same time I found them empowering; especially the ones about emotional abuse and neglect. Always remember that we are healing from the damage and that before the damage can be overcome, it has to be acknowledged.Acceptance in the context of accepting what happened is not the same thing as acceptance of the person who did it. Accepting the way a person “is” does not apply when abuse or mistreatment is involved. There is a big difference in accepting someone’s “faults”, verses accepting abusive treatment.
Darlene Ouimet
Don’t try to avoid criticism. If you do nothing, you will be nothing. If you do only the parts you really love, you will also be nothing. It takes what it takes. It takes all of it. Own it, accept it, embrace it and do it. Want all of what you want!
Akiroq Brost
We all belong here equally...Just by being born onto the earth we are accepted and the earth supports us. We don't have to be especially good. We don't have to accomplish anything. We don't even have to be healthy.
Polly Horvath
Don't look for peace. Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender
Eckhart Tolle
What I love about being queer is... Everything. I like that it makes me different, and I like that it makes people uncomfortable sometimes. I like that it makes people ask me lots of questions about things they probably would not normally ask people about their relationships or lifestyles. And most of all I love being queer because i get to have a girlfriend.
Tegan Quin
The poet who sees himself as a hero or a prophet, or a priest of the socio-political forces to which he is loyal, which he believes are the historical necessities of his times, too easily becomes a puppet. He has no external measure with which to assess reality. Whether he submits to the forces or rejects them, he becomes a parody of himself, and then without knowing it submits his gifts to the demons of his era. He loses his place in the continuity of time. He becomes dependent on social affirmation and the drug of exalted feelings common to all revolutionaries. He destroys, even as he thinks he creates.
Michael D. O'Brien
All right, shadow-priest, you've been spying — on what? What state secrets have you learned watching me groom these horses?''Only that they hate you, Daru. Every time your back was turned, they got ready to nip you — only you always seemed to step away at precisely the right moment-''Yes, I did, since I knew what they were intending. Each time.''Is this pride I hear? That you outwitted two horses?
Steven Erikson
Most counseling cases today involve good desires that have become overgrown. In these cases most relevant passages of Scripture may not be those that rebut particular manifestations of sin, but those that remind us to love God with all our hearts.
James MacDonald
Spending too much time in one's individual silo can produce pride, isolation, and a stagnated ministry.
James MacDonald
if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it.
David Brooks
In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister:
David Brooks
... there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven't lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don't associate them with pride, but they are still, at root, suffering from the same disease. They are still yoking happiness to accomplishment; it's just that they are giving themselves a D- rather than an A+. They tend to be just as solipsistic, and in their own way as self-centered, only in a self-pitying and isolating way rather than in an assertive and bragging way.
David Brooks
Pride doesn't go before a fall, it keeps you from falling.
Shane Peacock
I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.
Alice Munro