Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 62

What do you want to be, free or happy? How about if they really are mutually exclusive options? What is freedom anyway? How does humanity govern itself when each person can have anything they want? How does humanity govern itself when nothing is natural?
Jo Walton
Everything is a choice and we can always choose to come from a place of love.
Akiroq Brost
Democracies should be a delirium of choices - more options, not fewer; more avenues to travel, not fewer.
B.W. Powe
You got a choice, dude. We've all got choices. Lots of them. Every single second of the day we're making choices. You've just been making bad ones, is all.
Ruth Ozeki
One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's.
Michael Ignatieff
Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment, and the choices I make today or tomorrow or next week will lead me to the next and next present moments in my life. It is all a journey, Miss Jewell. I have come to understand that that is what life is all about-a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgement about what was right and what was wrong.
Mary Balogh
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path thats clear. I will choose Freewill.
Neil Peart
Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments.
Mary Balogh
[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.
Malcolm Gladwell
If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.
Neil Peart
...I always thought youth were idealists - now, I'm not so sure - I'm more idealistic now then at 17...
John Geddes
The Three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can't be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it's a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, that's unearned and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didn't blame them, having done the same once myself.
Margaret Atwood
I was tired of her getting away with being so young.
Margaret Atwood
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other. When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?
Naomi Klein
I had forgotten such innocence exists,/forgotten how it feels/ to live with neither calendars nor clocks
P.K. Page
I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than anything I'd ever seen or felt before.
Ruth Ozeki
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Margaret Atwood
The joy and laughter and youth they brought was an antidote to the somberness enveloping his flat, the hours when he felt the very walls and ceilings were encrusted with the distress of of unhappy decades
Rohinton Mistry
When I was very young, before I could read, I remember being very interested in comic books.
Nathan Fillion
Mrs. Hammon told me that God made my hair red on purpose and I haven't card for him since.
L.M. Montgomery
You are still young enough to think that torment of the spirit is a splendid thing, a sign of a superior nature. But you are no longer a young man; you are a youngish middle aged man, and it is time you found out that these spiritual athletics do not lead to wisdom.
Robertson Davies
Once upon a time we all walked on the golden road. It was a fair highway, through the Land of Lost Delight; shadow and sunshine were blessedly mingled, and every turn and dip revealed a fresh charm and a new loveliness to eager hearts and unspoiled eyes.On that road we heard the song of morning stars; we drank in fragrances aerial and sweet as a May mist; we were rich in gossamer fancies and iris hopes; our hearts sought and found the boon of dreams; the years waited beyond and they were very fair; life was a rose-lipped comrade with purple flowers dripping from her fingers.We may long have left the golden road behind, but its memories are the dearest of our eternal possessions; and those who cherish them as such may haply find a pleasure in the pages of this book, whose people are pilgrims on the golden road of youth.
L.M. Montgomery
I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.
Margaret Atwood
…but youth yearned to youth.
L.M. Montgomery
...how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.
Michael Ondaatje
I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves.
Margaret Atwood
So they all went home afterwards. My sisters and I sat on the veranda and cried until a storm drove us inside. We agreed to meet in the barn loft for crying once a week but after a while we forgot. Once we did but nobody could work up a cry and we started playing wolves and chickens and Little Mary had to be the chicken and Savannah shoved her out of the loft and broke her collarbone. The hearts of children are hard naturally because of their short memories. Everything they play with becomes true and unquestionable such as an acorn cap for a Holy Grail, such is the power of the untrained mind, and all our training of it is both of advantage and not.
Paulette Jiles
When you're that age, you sometimes have a great enthusiasm that is very deep and very narrow, and that is something that has always intrigued me-- that world of the eleven-year-old that is so quickly lost.
Alan Bradley
How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.
Michael Ondaatje
Liam recoiled as if I'd hoofed him in the danglies.
Jocelyn Adams
In the woods lay a bleeding angel in all her glory. Her arms posed gracefully above her head and her hair soaked in the mud, the blood and feces in which she lay. Dying, fading into the other realm, her form christened by the rain as though the trees had begun to weep upon her in sadness for the brutality she had endured. (The Children of Ankh series)
Kim Cormack
It's the rule of bird shit.
Janine McCaw
Fearful that they would be caught, the young lovers cast themselves into the sea with their stone, saying these words, "May we ever be united in love and hidden as long as this stone hides in deep waters.
Rebecca Boucher
Sometime later, I stood watching the cold rain fall, when suddenly I felt Daemon's arms around me and his lips on my neck. He loved my pregnant body and his hands roamed over it under the warm terrycloth of my bathrobe. I was lost in the moment, content to stay here forever...lost in the cold rain and welcoming warmth of Dublin, and lost in the arms of my husband. Since we arrived early this morning we were in our room, making love and sleeping, lost in a fairy tale moment, savoring every caress.
Rebecca Boucher
I remembered Daemon's feather soft kisses on my cheek, and I remembered the clouds parting and the sun shining on a cold February day in Ireland. And as my baby girl was laid on my chest and my husband held my hand, I saw my best friend Kat walk into the sun kissed part in the clouds, hand in hand, along with the last regrets of my past.
Rebecca Boucher
He sniffed her. The rubbery black nose inhaled deeply as it passed back and forth over her face, along her throat, her ears. Jeez, it was like being vacuumed-only most Hoovers didn't have the potential to bite her face off.
Dani Harper
Wrangling the cat into the cage proved interesting, and Josie had several scratches before Clint bent down and let out a menacing growl. The cat took one look at him and with a disdainful sniff, turned to march into the cage.
Eve Langlais
I spread my arms. “In the Rainbow Jungles of Ever there lives what I affectionately call, killer ducks.
Jen Wylie
When a thundering horde of drunken Vikings rush a person, it's only natural to flinch.
Krista D. Ball
I might be able to walk away from sexy, dangerous shifters, but chocolate had me at its beck and call.
Meghan Ciana Doidge
Live from a place of love. It conquers all that is evil.
Lee Bice-Matheson
Bad wolf. Stop baiting the human.
Eve Langlais
I have to.I've been fighting it all night. I'm going to lose. My battle is as futile as a woman feeling the first pangs of labor and deciding it's an inconvenient time to give birth. Nature wins out. It always does.
Kelley Armstrong
...And every day in heaven will be more beautiful than the one before it Davy," assured Anne.
L.M. Montgomery
When weeds go to heaven, I suppose they will be flowers.
L.M. Montgomery
What we often feel in ecstatic moments in this world - 'I don't ever want this to stop' - will be the constant thought of our hearts in that world. We shall think it, knowing that in fact it never WILL stop.
J.I. Packer
I have got acquainted with Lofty John. Ilse is a great friend of his and often goes there to watch him working in his carpenter shop. He says he has made enough ladders to get to heaven without the priest but that is just his joke.
L.M. Montgomery
It’s kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.
Peter Watts
Alecto, do you think we have fallen from heaven, or do you think we are falling towards it?
Rebecca McNutt
Life is not the end, and death is just the beginning...
Rebecca McNutt
Heaven is a place where you cannot change and nothing can ever happen, so the things you love are always eternal. Hell is exactly the same.
Geoff Ryman
Death brings release & removal from all evil, every tragedy & all difficulty. Death is not an enemy.
Paul P. Enns
God prevented Adam & Even from ETERNAL SINFULNESS by giving them the gift of death, the ability to exit this life & arrive safely in the wondrous life to come. Death, though it would appear to be man's greatest enemy, would in the end, prove to be his greatest friend. Only through can we go to God.
Paul P. Enns
...the most beautiful things don't always make you happy - often they make you weep...
John Geddes
At first happiness might seem like just desserts for biological fitness (more accurately, the states that would have led to fitness in the environment in which we evolved). We are happier when we are healthy, well-fed, comfortable, safe, prosperous, knowledgeable, respected, non-celibate, and loved. Compared to their opposites, these objects of striving are conducive to reproduction. The function of happiness would be to mobilize the mind to seek the keys to Darwinian fitness. When we are unhappy, we work for the things that make us happy; when we are happy, we keep the status quo. The problem is, how much fitness is worth striving for?
Steven Pinker
Being happy where you are does not mean that you must unquestioningly accept parts of your environment that don't serve you. Where you are is inside of this amazing body, this beautiful moment, this capable mind. Where you are is inside of an eternal opportunity. And sometimes you need to change your environment to remember that.
Vironika Tugaleva
Try as you might, you'll never be able to please an environmentalist. You can stop using coal to heat your house, you can stop throwing out bottles and cans, you can have every factory in Canada shut down and you can buy only organic gluten-free non-GMO food, you can give up your favorite station wagon for a weird electric hybrid, you can stop developing film and buy a never-ending cycle of digital cameras, you can give up your job at a refinery or mill, and they'll still get after you for not enjoying yourself while doing so.
Rebecca McNutt
I am happiest when I clear my mind and allow the world around me to reteach me what I thought I already knew.
Vironika Tugaleva
It has been a Prosy day for us, but for some people it has been a wonderful day. Someone was rapturously happy in it. Perhaps a great deed has been done somewhere today- a great poem written- or a great man born. And some heart has been broken, Phil.
L.M. Montgomery
I wake up exhausted it's not morning. It's back to sleep to re-dream me. We're alone and we're happy. But there you are, angry with me
Tegan Quin