Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 75

Whatever you do, it will be a path. Life does not work like a light switch - on/off, fat/skinny, miserable/happy, crazy/sane. All things take time, patience, and practice. Anyone who tells you different is profiting off your fearful ignorance of the truth.
Vironika Tugaleva
I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
Margaret Atwood
The more I see of the country, the less I feel I know about it. There is a saying that after five years in the north every man is an expert; after ten years, a novice.
Pierre Berton
Racism is a refuge for the ignorant. It seeks to divide and to destroy. It is the enemy of freedom, and deserves to be met head-on and stamped out.
Pierre Berton
There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others.
R. Scott Bakker
Most people, including Ma, preferred to brush unpleasantness away, as if, by sweeping it outside with the dust, it could be forgotten. As if, by acknowledging the existence of something unsavory in their community, they might be tainted by it themselves.
Shilpi Somaya Gowda
I guess ignorance is bliss - when I do interviews people always say, "Aren't you upset that people make fun of you?" and I'm like, "Are they making fun of me?" I guess I just don't get it.
Pamela Anderson
The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
William Osler
It is my sincere desire that my research and hard work will help create a world where we all learn to walk this Earth, safe, enlightened and free from the perils of cruelty, ignorance, and all the other dark and sinister forces, which make assholes possible.
Alexei Maxim Russell
I suspect that much of life is like that. We seldom see what is closest to our eyes.
Jack Whyte
...when someone is honest and vulnerable, they wring my heart - I want to hug them for being real...
John Geddes
She said that in writing anything, you must be perfectly honest.
Lesley Choyce
If there is no honesty, there is no relationship. The only degree to which there is a relationship is the degree to which you are honest. Expressing your clear desires does not make you a dictator and you telling what you think, feel, and what you want or don’t want, is just called being honest. It doesn't control him at all. You’re trying to control others by withholding information by not getting involved and by not being honest. Withholding information is a form of manipulation. It is dishonest and it’s destructive to a relationship.
Stefan Molyneux
His eyes searched hers. “I’d rather just be me. Feel comfortable in my own skin and be able to speak my mind without having to carry a damned thesaurus. Sure doesn’t seem worth giving up who you are to please others. Far as I’m concerned, they either like me or they don’t. Their choice.
Leah Braemel
To be yourself is in many ways, is to be inconvenient to others. Only placaters and appeasers get along with other people all the time and that's not really getting along with anyone. That's just self erasure.To be alive, to be in a relationship is to constantly court inconvenience to others and out of that inconvenience can come enormous growth. I simply work as an imperasist. Empiricism comes first. So, I speak things that are inconvenient to others but, true for me. I observe their response. It's incredibly easy to find out the truth in your relationships. All you do is speak the truth. You speak the truth about what's on your mind to those around you and their true natures will be revealed in about 5 seconds.You have honesty in your relationships. You speak the truth about your experience, thought's, and feelings in your relationships and then you do not control how other people respond. Your as honest as can be and you simply observe how they respond. It's like that spray you use to see the lasers in the room. Honesty reveals everything.OK So, if these people constantly sacrifice my happiness, security, and mental health for the sake of their petty emotional selfish needs then I could choose to stay in those relationships if I want. I mean, I could choose to continue to hire an employee who steals from me everyday. I just have to be aware that he's stealing from me everyday.
Stefan Molyneux
Sorry, but I have to be who I am. Everyone else is taken... So be your self! Speak your truth - if there are people around you who tempt you with non-existence blast through that and give them the full glory of who you are. Do not withhold yourself from the world. Do not piss on the incandescent gift of your existence. Do not drown yourself in the petty fog and dustiness of other people's ancient superstitions, unbeliefs, aggressions, culture and crap! No! Be a flare! We were born that way. Born perfectly happy being inconvenient to our parents. We shit, piss, cry, wake up at night, throw up on their shoulders, scream... We are, in essence, in our humanity, perfectly comfortable with inconveniencing others. That's how we're born, how we grow and develop. I choose to inconvenience the irrational.
Stefan Molyneux
Being loved means; are disagreements welcome in my relationships? If you cant disagree with someone then you live in a tyranny and if you live in a tyranny then you are only loved to the degree that you erase yourself and conform to the irrational expectations of bullies. That isn't love obviously. Now if somebody in you life demands that you not disagree with them and gets angry, "offended", or outraged should you disagree with them then, that person is not a good person. It's pretty narcissistic. It's somebody who does not have the maturity, wisdom, and ego strength to handle, and in fact welcome disagreements. When people disagree with me as a whole I think it's a great opportunity for learning. People don't want to expose topics that might cause disagreement because, if the disagreement is punished then the illusion of being loved by good people is shattered.
Stefan Molyneux
He was a man more concerned with the truth than his arrest quota, a philosophy that would often have him skate on thin ice with the higher ups.
Bruce Crown
A tear cringed off his cheek and stained her writing on the paper. He didn’t wipe it, men must be honest and transparent, they should never wipe their tears.
Bruce Crown
I am reminded of yet one more reason why I avoid children, why I have remained intentionally childless. Children make ruthless biographers and terrifying judges.
Kyo Maclear
In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony.
Mordecai Richler
But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit.
Mordecai Richler
Self-manipulation is our medication. Mythology is our drug. The only cure is honesty.
Stefan Molyneux
Even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average.
Saul Bellow
Truth is like a bright full moon in a dark country sky. Powerful, bright and undeniable. Lies are like clouds that continually try to cover that moon. Sometimes they might be able to cover the moon, but only temporarily. The truth will always outshine the clouds.
Alex Haditaghi
We get along like a house on fire these days.
Rebecca McNutt
Somehow I get the idea that being whole is about being perfectly consistent. I'd rather we be perfectly honest.
Danielle LaPorte
You believe what you do.
Elan Mastai
Orozco's despair was not just in finding himself poor, but in discovering that effort, honest intentions, and gentlemanly status had nothing to do with sucess in a commercial economy.
Timothy Brook
Things work out better when you're straight up.
Kate Jacobs
Life is warped. I'm just in sync.
Margaret Atwood
Maybe my expectations for honesty are too high.
Kelley Armstrong
Think of any great man or woman. How can you separate them from the years in which they lived? You can't. Their greatness lies in their response to that moment.
Timothy Findley
The excitement of opportunity and challenge inspires us to push for greatness.
Lorii Myers
Remember that you don't owe anyone an apology. You are who you are, you have no choice, and that is beautiful.
Emy Storey
Full of beautiful grace so we steal their space, and death comes quickly.
Sara Quin
...I remember the oily smoke of a cigarette suspended in a shaft of sunlight - with you, everything was beautiful...
John Geddes
...I hardly ever see your profile, but have I told you it's beautiful? - like the soft gentle lines of snow...
John Geddes
There are two sacred causes in this world,” he said, holding up his pinkie and ring ringer. “Chance and necessity. By chance I was there to help when you had need.
Rachel Hartman
The static’s nice. I could do without the screechi
Peter Watts
If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.
Margaret Atwood
A name could be either a ghost or a portent depending on which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in the liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.
Ruth Ozeki
Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can get.
Yann Martel
In the fall, she knew it was Death who sweetened the apples.
Martine Leavitt
Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.
Mordecai Richler
Liam, soon-to-be-fucking-dead, Callahan was walking down the stairs—my fucking stairs—with his sex hair high and his green eyes sharper than razor blades. He was beautiful, and I almost regretted the fact that I would have to put a bullet in his head and then smash it through a fucking wall.-Melody G.
J.J. McAvoy
The promise of aspiration is that it is evolutionary. The human condition is such that we are always aspiring to be something more, something better, something nobler. It starts as a thought, a want, a need, or a desire and then grows and evolves with intention and direction, upward with lust and hunger. The continued drive feeds the rise.
Lorii Myers
Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I’m Human again.
Peter Watts
They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being.
Steven Pinker
Okay, there's this thing you can do, a thing you can do like no other person on this planet. That makes you special, but being special really doesn't mean anything. You still have to get dressed in the morning. Your shoelaces still break. Your lover will still leave you if you don't treat her right
Andrew Kaufman
Some very common foods and drinks are aversive. Few people enjoy, at first, coffee, beer, tobacco, or chili pepper. Pleasure from pain is uniquely human. No other animal willingly eats such foods when there are alternatives. Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans—language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.
Paul Bloom
our struggle to celebrate each other is what's proven most difficult in being human
Rupi Kaur
No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn.
Steven Pinker
Right now universes are being created thrown together and destroyed the world over. Seven billion souls, each preoccupied with their own unique reality, each with a head full of memories, plans, learned knowledge and accumulated trivia; birthdays, telephone numbers, bus routes, passwords. Each one with somewhere to go, something they need to get done. They all have birth certificates and shoe sizes. Every single one has a story.
Graeme Cameron
For eighty-eight years, the world revolved around Ivy. That which she could see and touch was real to her, everything else a mere figment. Departing visitors, setting off back for their own lives, were swiftly dispatched from her conscious thoughts, taking with them all tangible evidence of their existence. She would lock her doors to the outside world and settle down with a cup of tea, but for Foggy entirely alone in her world. And yet conversely, whilst the conversation in that departing car might revolve around Ivy for a handful of miles, the reality of her existence would soon be forgotten in favor of the more immediate stresses and strains pervading the lives of Peter and Janet. Out of sight, out of mind.Every human being occupies a space at the dead center of his or her own universe.
Graeme Cameron
Don't be so sure," said Gamache. "It's a little humbling to realize the pedestal isn't quite so high after all."Brebeuf chuckled. "Welcome to earth, Armand. It's a little dirty down here.
Louise Penny
Maybe I’m a human, but I’m a me-and-Ma as well.
Emma Donoghue
...I recall that day on the beach - the sand so brilliant, the clouds so massive, and the wind punishing your hair...
John Geddes
...spiritual or emotional pain doesn't become a memory so much as a bruise ...
John Geddes
...everyone wants to be excited by something magical and wondrous - to be reminded of how they once saw the world ...
John Geddes