Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 72

And may my bronze name / touch always her thousand fingers / grow brighter with her weeping / until I am fixed like a galaxy / and memorized / in her secret and fragile skies.
Leonard Cohen
If you look closely you'll find all my lovers inscribed on my skin.
Jill Ciment
At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?-Richard
Douglas Coupland
Were we all like that? Were we all trying to change how we looked on the outside to match how we felt on the inside? Were we all trying to change how people saw us?
Cecil Castellucci
...at some point we must achieve our identity -we can't be always in adolescence seeking who we are...
John Geddes
...you became lost in the maze of me - forgive me Love, for keeping you close...
John Geddes
Peter." The fine hair along her spine rising, Vicky could feel the power in a name. This is who you are, it said. Come back to us.
Tanya Huff
Oh Harry," [Gwen] said. "I wish I were a different kind of person."What kind of person, he wanted to know."Someone," she said slowly, "who truly loves life."He was still looking at her, still cradling his glasses in his left hand. He said, "You're the kind of person who never stops trying.
Elizabeth Hay
We are identified and known by the sort of fruit, the quantity of fruit, and the quality of fruit borne out in our daily conversation, conduct, and character. There is no greater criterion for Christians. It is the paramount gauge of God's people.
W. Phillip Keller
It's my diary", she'd explained. "Every mark I've had drawn on my skin connects me to where and who I've been- so I never forget who I am and how I got here."There was humour in the smile she offered him. "And you know what the real beauty of it is?" Hank had shaken his head. "Nobody can take it away.
Charles de Lint
The ultimate barrier against love is the barrier of the constructed self.
Vironika Tugaleva
Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we're at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?
Douglas Coupland
The more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.
Eckhart Tolle
In many cases you are not buying a product but an “identity enhancer.” Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore “exclusive.” If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid.
Eckhart Tolle
Everything about the house was rich, and dense, and rooted. It was everything I wasn’t. Even the air, with its distinct smell of oak wood and sage, spoke to its identify and its history. I couldn’t help but feel small here. Overwhelmed. Incompatible.
Bianca Scardoni
Artists hide their identities in the brushstrokes of their paintings, the verses in their cantos, and the sentences in their novels. The true face of an artist is never on his face and this is what he prefers. Others misunderstand this displaced melancholy with an absence of melancholy.
Bruce Crown
the same—on this page, or the end of your fingertips—always the same
John J. Geddes
The child I wasis just one breath away from me.
Sheniz Janmohamed
If we consider this official or elite multiculturalism as an ideological state apparatus we can see it as a device for constructing and ascribing political subjectivities and agencies for those who are seen as legitimate and full citizens and others who are peripheral to this in many senses. There is in this process an element of racialized ethnicization, which whitens North Americans of European origins and blackens or darkens their 'others' by the same stroke. This is integral to Canadian class and cultural formation and distribution of political entitlement. The old and established colonial/racist discourses of tradition and modernity, civilization and savagery, are the conceptual devices of the construction and ascription of these racialized ethnicities. It is through these 'conceptual practices of power' (Smith, 1990) that South Asians living in Canada, for example, can be reified as hindu or muslim, in short as religious identities.....We need to repeat that there is nothing natural or primordial about cultural identities - religious or otherwise - and their projection as political agencies. In this multiculturalism serves as a collection of cultural categories for ruling or administering, claiming their representational status as direct emanations of social ontologies. This allows multiculturalism to serve as an ideology, both in the sense of a body of content, claiming that 'we' or 'they' are this or that kind of cultural identities, as well as an epistemological device for occluding the organization of the social....an interpellating device which segments the nation's cultural and political space as well as its labour market into ethnic communities....Defined thus, third world or non-white peoples living in Canada become organized into competitive entities with respect to each other. They are perceived to have no commonality, except that they are seen as, or self-appellate as, being essentially religious, traditional or pre-modern, and thus civilizationally backward. This type of conceptualization of political and social subjectivity or agency allows for no cross-border affiliation or formation, as for example does the concept of class.
Himani Bannerji
She isn't like any of the girls I ever knew, or any of the girls I was myself.
L.M. Montgomery
But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down.
Margaret Atwood
This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.
Rachel Cusk
She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she felt herself summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when 'Anne's life' just about covered it.
Rachel Cusk
Let's just say that drama became something very real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out on the wold. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her.I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.
Rachel Cusk
I would like”, she resumed, “to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.
Rachel Cusk
I feel separated and cut off from the world around me, but occasionally I've felt that it was really a part of me, and I hope I'll have that feeling again, and that next time it won't go away. That's a dim, misty outline of the story that's told so often, of how man once lived in a golden age or a garden of Eden or the Hesperides ... how that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it back again. ... This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
Northrop Frye
The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.
Northrop Frye
No one knows who they are more than someone who changes their identity (before I became a farmer, I was a leadership coach).
M.C. Humphreys
People change, though, especially after they are dead.
Margaret Atwood
...the issue becomes not whether a person has experience with a stigma of his own, because he has, but rather how many varieties he has had his own experience with.
Erving Goffman
Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
Michael Ondaatje
When you let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are, what happens to confusion? Suddenly it is gone. 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
I don't want it to end, and so, as every therapist knows, the ego does not want an end to its “problems” because they are part of its identity. If no one will listen to my sad story, I can tell it to myself in my head, over and over, and feel sorry for myself, and so have an identity as someone who is being treated unfairly by life or other people, fate or God. It gives definition to my self-image, makes me into someone, and that is all that matters to the ego.
Eckhart Tolle
The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names... Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.
Michael Ondaatje
you cross the field in the snow leaving tracks in perfect whiteness ...disturbing my placid universe...marking the landscape within me ...
John Geddes
But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.
Peter Watts
A universe without purpose should neither depress us nor suggest that our lives are purposeless. Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness. We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun.
Lawrence M. Krauss
There is a present because it works with my theories. If you find a better one than mine, then I may reconsider, but for the sake of the universe—and oh, how we philosophers make the universe weep—there is a present, and it is the time you just left.
Mary-Jean Harris
Eldora smiled up at Paulo cunningly, her dark eyes twinkling. “You are old, Father.”“Not as old as I shall be, before I have finished with the universe.
Mary-Jean Harris
We enter this universe alone in search of microscopic beauty—and while we love, or are loved by others—we leave this world completely alone, having only found infinite sorrow. Despite there being so many of us, each of us tragically realizes that everyone is on a solitary journey. No one else can see what we see, hear what we hear, feel, what we feel. All we have of each other are glimpses of moments, whispers of experiences, memories of the past we wish we could make eternal, but in the end, we become a faint memory in the minds of a few good people.
Bruce Crown
Was that what it was all about? To know everything—the ultimate quest of the philosopher, to comprehend the universe from the highest heaven down to the dirt upon the Earth. And Wolfdon desired to go there too, wherever “there” might be.
Mary-Jean Harris
The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places.
Robert Charles Wilson
What the fuck is legal in this universe? Stars eat each other, wolves eat the pigs, and Grandma fucks over Little Red Riding Hood.
Rawi Hage
Send these images of me through the internet out into the universe, where I will continue my out-of-body existence.
David Cronenberg
The chakras in your body are as to galaxies on the body of God.
L.J Vanier
The awakening is finally realizing that you are a part of God, like a single cell that finally sees it is a part of you.
L.J Vanier
Trapped on a school bus for an hour each morning and each evening, she devoured book after book. She explored a hundred worlds, indifferent to her peers and the passing of the universe.
Danika Stone
To maintain any degree of sanity, we must believe that everything is interconnected on some level and to experience that level fully once in a while.
Vironika Tugaleva
If the universe doesn't care about us and if we're an accident in a remote corner of the universe, in some sense it makes us more precious. The meaning in our lives is provided by us; we provide our own meaning.
Lawrence M. Krauss
We’re not the greatest thing in the universe, certainly not the smartest. Seems logical there’d be a great many things in it we can’t comprehend.
Sylvain Neuvel
It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.
Margaret Atwood
The church's theology bought into this ahistoricism in different ways: along a more liberal, post-Kantian trajectory, the historical particularities of Christian faith were reduced to atemporal moral teachings that were universal and unconditioned. Thus it turned out that what Jesus taught was something like Kant's categorical imperative - a universal ethics based on reason rather than a set of concrete practices related to a specific community. Liberal Christianity fostered ahistoricism by reducing Christianity to a universal, rational kernel of moral teaching. Along a more conservative, evangelical trajectory (and the Reformation is not wholly innocent here), it was recognized that Christians could not simply jettison the historical particularities of the Christian event: the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, there was still a quasi-Platonic, quasi-gnostic rejection of material history such that evangelicalism, while not devolving to a pure ahistoricism, become dominated by a modified ahistoricism we can call primitivism. Primitivism retains the most minimal commitment to God's action in history (in the life of Christ and usually in the first century of apostolic activity) and seeks to make only this first-century 'New Testament church' normative for contemporary practice. This is usually articulated by a rigid distinction between Scripture and tradition (the latter then usually castigated as 'the traditions of men' as opposed to the 'God-give' realities of Scripture). Such primitivism is thus anticreedal and anticatholic, rejecting any sense that what was unfolded by the church between the first and the twenty-first centuries is at all normative for current faith and practice (the question of the canon's formation being an interesting exception here). Ecumenical creeds and confessions - such as the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed - that unite the church across time and around the globe are not 'live' in primitivist worship practices, which enforce a sense of autonomy or even isolation, while at the same time claiming a direct connection to first-century apostolic practices.
James K.A. Smith
As I look hard at the Bible, however, and at the two thousand years of church history since the Bible's completion, it seems evident that God has accommodated himself over and over to the weakness and even the sin of human beings. He also has called his faithful ones to a similar accommodation. The 'already but not yet' tension is clear not only with the coming of Christ but also throughout the Old Testament story of redemption. God chooses a people as a vehicle for global salvation and then works with them in a convoluted trajectory of obedience and blessing, disobedience and punishment, first this way and then that way. God puts up with a compromised plan for the conquest of Canaan, blesses a monarchy he did not want, forestalls the prophesied judgment on both northern and southern kingdoms for generations, and even then preserves a remnant and reestablishes it in Jerusalem. God works not only through Israel but also through the empires of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and Rome. God works not only through prophets and saints but also through Joseph's brothers, Balaam and his donkey, Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, Caiaphas and Pilate.
John G. Stackhouse Jr.
Scripture offers the unique access to the story of redemption and then, in turn, funds tradition, reason and experience, as God's Word is remembered, experienced, and thought about.
Clark H. Pinnock
Without God's Word as a lens, the world warps.
Ann Voskamp
And it's the 'Word of God' that turns the rocks in the mouth to loaves on the tongue. That fills our emptiness with the true and real good, 'that makes the eyes see', the body full of light.
Ann Voskamp
I wear the lens of the Word and all the world transfigures into the Beauty of Christ and 'everything is eucharisteo'.
Ann Voskamp
The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.
J.I. Packer
Every time we mention God we become theologians, and the only question is whether we are going to be good ones or bad ones.
J.I. Packer
A continual diet of the Word satisfies, and it builds an appetite for more.
James MacDonald