Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 69

The confusing lesson whipped Frankie's anger into something she had never felt before. It was like an emotional meringue - the airy feeling of loneliness topped with the hard crisp of injustice. Yet its taste was far from sweet.
Lisi Harrison
Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.
Rachel Hartman
Maneck studied beggermaster's excessive chatter, his attempt to hide his heartache. Why did human do that to their feelings? Whether it was anger or love or sadness, they always tried to put something else forward in its place. And then there were those who pretended their emotions were bigger and grander than anyone else's. A little annoyance they acted like gigantic rage; where a smile or chuckle will do, they laughed hysterically. Either way, it was dishonest.
Rohinton Mistry
Gamache nodded. It was what made his job so fascinating, and so difficult. How the same person could be both kind and cruel, compassionate and wretched. Unraveling a murder was more about getting to know the people than the evidence. People who were contrary and contradictory, and who often didn't even know themselves.
Louise Penny
If you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance. You don't know what you've got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality.
Saul Bellow
It seems to be a law of human nature that those who live by the sea are suspiciousof swimmers, just as those who live in the mountains are suspicious of mountainclimbers.
Yann Martel
Sound the tocsin of national peril and hordes of well-meaning folk with nothing much to do always materialize from nowhere. They itch to meddle in great matters of which their comprehension is usually pretty dim, and have no objection to getting their names and pictures in the papers.
Leslie McFarlane
It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature—like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines
Mary MacLane
It's our nature, isn't it? Again and again, we cling to the foolish belief taht simple solutions exist
Steven Erikson
Humor relieves the tension between what we see or desire but repress in order to sustain a survivable illusion about the world we live in. As such it's always potent stuff, and dangerous.
Lynda Williams
We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.
Steven Pinker
He fashioned an empire of sorts, bereft of cities yet plagued with the endless dramas of society, its pathetic victories and inevitable failures. The community of enslaved Imass thrived in this quagmire of pettiness. They even managed to convince themselves that they possessed freedom, a will of their own that could shape destiny. They elected champions. They tore down their champions once failure draped its shroud over them. They ran in endless circles and called it growth, emergence, knowledge. While over them all, a presence invisible to their eyes, Raest flexed his will. His greatest joy came when his slaves proclaimed him god – though they knew him not – and constructed temples to serve him and organized priesthoods whose activities mimicked Raest’s tyranny with such cosmic irony that the Jaghut could only shake his head.
Steven Erikson
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
Steven Pinker
At some indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or wooden cocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state, which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings. However, we did not observe that any had actually done so.
Margaret Atwood
Wake up! Be yourself, not a bad copy of something else!
Robertson Davies
There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,' Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. 'Severity always,' went the British motto, 'justice when possible.
Wade Davis
Social mores, he argued, rules of protocol, concepts of rectitude and honor had no objective basis. They were only reflections of public and private fears.
Wade Davis
How many times have I told you never listen to a person's words; watch their actions to see what is in their heart. A person can say many things they do not mean." Charlie to Beth
Lynsay Sands
So everybody lives the way they're told to.The way they have to. Everybody most of the time. Not ever all the time. Hair style, clothing, manner of speech, ideas, cars, houses, and everything. Just like they have to. Even the way we walk. But not all the time. Comes a time when everybody breaks out. And that's the only characteristic of human nature I know of. Not greed, not obedience, not violence, nor any of those things the capitalists would have us believe are intrinsic. Only rebellion.
Helen Potrebenko
People are not hooked on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook but on each other. Tools and services come and go; what is constant is our human urge to share.
Alfred Hermida
Just because somebody smiles when he hands me a bag of shit, that doesn't mean I have to take it. I don't give a damn how friendly he is. It's what he does that matters.
David Morrell
People who have suffered understand pain and are often the best at helping others.
Nadia Fezzani
Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.
Steven Pinker
Where were we? I've forgotten. He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.Right. Yes. The usual choices.
Margaret Atwood
None of us gets to choose how we're born, it's what we make of ourselves afterwards.
Kenneth Oppel
I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children.
Margaret Atwood
At heart, we're all violent raging wolves, but in our actions we can be pacifists.
Polly Horvath
Even in the darkest and most cruel person, there is still a kernel of good. and within the most perfect champion, there is also darkness. The question is, will one give into the dark or the light?
Morgan Rhodes
There are large moments in life; but sometimes it is the small moments - the casual moments - that change everything. The second's absent wandering of attention before an accident. The choice to take one road, instead of another.
Simone St. James
In the end, I will have to make a choice about how to tell my story....There has to be a moment of going forward, when all the possibilities are left behind.
Helen Humphreys
The fault lies with us, and only us. It's not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and it's definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately it's us and our choices...but the most powerful spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well.
Louise Penny
Surprising choice proves hardest to come by. Most choices, even the disastrous ones, are predictable.
Carrie Snyder
Redemption. What a laughable concept. When he looked over his life, he couldn't see where he had first stepped off the righteous path. More important, had he even ever laid a single foot on that path?
Michael R. Fletcher
(...) 6,400,099,980 moments that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.
Ruth Ozeki
You don’t get to rewind your life like a tape and splice it back together, pretending it never knotted and tore, when it did and you know it did.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Be savagely thankful, and continuously in awe of the power you possess. You are alive. Inside of an endless cosmos with the freedom that shines brightest in the dark.. Choices. Your choices belong to you so intimately, that they will never leave you. They, unlike the changing nature of love, where the failing machinery of our bodies will never abandon you to time. Good or bad, they will stay always. An antique that shows the future who you were and what you stood for. So know that what you choose to stand for, is what will inform you of what you've chosen to stand against, so stand. Let each foot crash land into what you believe, and plant them they're firmly so they may take root in your convictions. And stand.
Shane L. Koyczan
Replace a bad habit with a better one. Instead of trying to "break out of a habit", try to use the trigger or cue to initiate a different action. Find something better, healthier, to replace the habit. This will be a lot easier than trying to force yourself to do nothing when you feel very compelled to do something. Left unchecked this is why we often see one bad habit turning into another bad habit. Take charge by deciding ahead of time what you will replace with what. Keep track. Celebrate your victories. Strengthen and empower yourself. By repeatedly doing this over and over again you will weaken the association between the trigger/cue and the old habit. At the same time you will strengthen the association between the trigger/cue and the new habit. This is very important. Some people believe the solution is to try to avoid the trigger/cue, but avoidance does nothing to prepare you in the event you fall into that scenario accidentally. It's like preparing for the worst, not by being pessimistic, but by being proactive. The first step to change is believing it could be possible. The second is action. Inaction leads to chaos. It pays to be prepared. Believe you are strong! You are bigger than your problems and your fears.
Akiroq Brost
Your life. Your choices. People will give you endless opinions on how you should live your life and who you should be. Don't allow them. Don't listen. This is your life.
Akiroq Brost
There are choices in life which you are aware, even as you make them, cannot be undone; choices after which, once made, things will never be the same.There is that moment when you can still walk away, but if you do, you will never know what might have been.
Alan Bradley
What you must remember is that the magic itself is neither good nor bad, no more so than this ship might be used for right or wrong. It might be used by a fisherman to feed a village, for example. Or, the same vessel might be sailed by pirates to murder and pillage...the lumber, rope, nails, cotton, and everything that goes into it-is created by the True One. Humans decide how it is to be put together and how it is used.
Derek Donais
You already made the choice, you are simply here to walk it.
L.J Vanier
They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.
Margaret Atwood
Everybody's got the potential for great good and great wrong in them, but it's thechoices we make that define who we really are.
Charles de Lint
What kind of tea do you want?""There´s more than one kind of tea?...What do you have?""Let´s see... Blueberry, Raspberry, Ginseng, Sleepytime, Green Tea, Green Tea with Lemon, Green Tea with Lemon and Honey, Liver Disaster, Ginger with Honey, Ginger Without Honey, Vanilla Almond, White Truffle Coconut, Chamomile, Blueberry Chamomile, Decaf Vanilla Walnut, Constant Comment and Earl Grey."-"I.. Uh...What are you having?... Did you make some of those up?
Bryan Lee O'Malley
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson
Sometimes we must leave our true homes for something greater to come.
Mary-Jean Harris
The journey as a writer is not so much about our stories, but the stories of others we meet along the way on our wonderful path. #grateful
Lee Bice-Matheson
Love, happiness, peace - these are not final destinations. They are in every moment, every breath, everything.
Vironika Tugaleva
Let the devil bar my way, I will come back to ye.
Susanna Kearsley
But the artist began to have misgivings as the wall underwent its transformation. Bigger than any pavement project he had yet undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation, and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey -- chanced, unplanned, solitary -- was the thing to relish.Now, however, his old way of life was being threatened. The agreeable neighborhood and the solidity of the long, black wall were reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own....
Rohinton Mistry
The joy is in the climb. Appreciate the process. To build or perfect anything takes time and effort. That time and effort adds value. Embrace the journey.
Akiroq Brost
They hurried when they could, and dozed when they had to, hiding in tangles of bloodtwig and heartsease at the edge of the road.
Erin Bow
When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes even genius; if you fail in the end, you remain a madman in the eyes of others, and maybe even yourself. When you are in the midst of the journey…there’s really no way of knowing which one you are.” (p.129)
Hilary Austen
No one has a problem with the first mile of a journey. Even an infant could do fine for a while. But it isn't the start that matters. It's the finish line.
Julien Smith
Sometimes you don’t know when you’re taking the first step through a door until you’re already inside.
Ann Voskamp
But we don't have to react. That's what I'm saying. A police force, like a government, should be above that. Just because we're provoked doesn't mean we have to act. -- Still Life
Louise Penny
Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Cory Doctorow
For the developing world, the past half-century has been a time of recurring hope and frequent disappointment. Great waves of change have washed over the landscape, from the crumbling of colonial hegemonies in mid-century to the recent collapse of Communist empires. But too often, what rushed in to replace the old order were empty hopes-not only in the false allure of state socialism, non-alignment and single-party rule, but also the false glories of romantic nationalism and narrow tribalism, and the false dawn of runaway individualism.
Aga Khan
The idea that the State is capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great skepticism - which foretells a coming change.As soon as skepticism is applied to the State, the State falls, since it fails at everything except increasing its power, and so can only survive on propaganda, which relies on unquestioning faith.
Stefan Molyneux
Because the state uses violence to achieve its ends, and there is no rational end to the use of violence, states grow until they destroy civilized interactions through the corruption of money, contracts, honesty, family and self-reliance.No state in history has ever been contained.It’s only taken a little more than a century for the US – founded on the idea of limited government, to break the bonds of the constitution, institute the income tax, take control of the money supply and the educational system and begin its catastrophic expansion.
Stefan Molyneux