Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 86

So she's one of the grande dames of fandom? The Madame de Staël of the Starveil world?
Danika Stone
Trust me. What a phrase. Is it a phrase or an idiom? I was never a wordsmith and I was too far along in life to even attempt to tackle a problem as complicated as words. Do writers struggle as much with words as a painter does with his paint and his brush?“Okay,” it is impossible not to trust a beautiful woman. Even macho noir anti-heroes who talk about staying out of trouble and doin’ nothin’ for nobody always get sucked into intricate snares set for them by beautiful women… I would not be an exception.
Bruce Crown
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
Steven Pinker
No matter what level of success, there is no such thing as a secure writer
Michael Lennick
Writers often have the cleanest windows, floors, fridges and toilets, the most up-to-date filing system or the best record for returning calls or e-mails because, in the moment, just about any task seems more palatable than sitting down to write.” (p.136)
Mark David Gerson
Hope is a most beautiful drug.
Jeremy Mercer
It’s lovely when writers I like like each other.
Jo Walton
I wonder why people so commonly suppose that if two individuals are both writers they must therefore be hugely congenial," said Anne, rather scornfully. "Nobody would expect two blacksmiths to be violently attracted toward each other merely because they were both blacksmiths.
L.M. Montgomery
Before publishers' blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing.
Laurence J. Peter
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
Alberto Manguel
There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
Margaret Atwood
Anyone can take a picture of poverty; it’s easy to focus on the dirt and hurt of the poor. It’s much harder—and much more needful—to pry under that dirt and reveal the beauty and dignity of people that, but for their birth into a place and circumstance different from our own, are just like ourselves. I want my images to tell the story of those people and to move us beyond pity to justice and mercy.
David duChemin
People of civilized countenance made much of exposing the soft underbellies of their psyche - effete and sensitive were the brands of finer breeding. It was easy for them, safe, and that was the whole point, after all: a statement of coddled opulence that burned the throats of the poor more than any ostentatious show of wealth.
Steven Erikson
Social justice has to do with issues such as poverty, inequality, war, racism, sexism, abortion, and lack of concern for ecology because what lies at the root at each of these is not so much someone's private sin but rather a huge, blind system that is inherently unfair.
Ronald Rolheiser
Charity is appeased when some rich person gives money to the poor while justice asks why one person can be that rich when so many are poor.
Ronald Rolheiser
She’s a lean vixen: I can seethe ribs, the slytrickster’s eyes, filled with longing and desperation, the skinnyfeet, adept at lies.Why encourage the notionof virtuous poverty?It’s only an excusefor zero charity.Hunger corrupts, and absolute hungercorrupts absolutely,
Margaret Atwood
Then he said the funny thing was the old man himself had left home when he was a kid, after a fight with his own father. The father lit into him for using the wheelbarrow."It was this way. They always carried the feed to the horses, pail by pail. In the winter, when the horses were in the stalls. So my father took the notion to carry it to them in the wheelbarrow. Naturally it was a lot quicker. But he got beat. For laziness. That was the way they were, you know. Any change of any kind was a bad thing. Efficiency was just laziness, to them. That's the peasant thinking for you.
Alice Munro
This is the basis for the most important critique of microfinance. The poor are not entrepreneurs. The idea that more than a few will turn tiny loans into a viable business is simply unrealistic.
Ian Smillie
The poor love life as passionately as the rich do. Perhaps more, for the effort it takes to cling to it.
Joan Thomas
To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.
Jane Jacobs
Death is a dark flower, its perfume heady and dangerous as it pulls you into its bosom.
Carol Weekes
...you can have a dark heart and be a writer, but you can't have a black one..
John Geddes
...Sunday evenings are heavier than clouds with rain, darker too and often interminable...
John Geddes
Your diet must be about fifty-fifty, carrots and locoweed," Annie said softly.He froze."I can't figure out what in the name of God's labia majora you think you're doing...but I'm impressed by how well you're doing it in the dark. You must have eyes like a cat.
Spider Robinson
...cities are murky places - hatching grounds for monsters...
John Geddes
... only darkened trails of rain could paint your face upon a pane...
John Geddes
There is a duality to darkness known only to those who’ve been infected by its touch. Everyone knows the shadows: shallow, comfortable, mostly harmless places where one might nest for a night. But the depths of living pitch only visit the aristocracy of madmen and women who’ve unwittingly pledged fealty to the curse. For some, it outright ruins minds like a hound to fresh meat; for others, it wanes into the deepest parts of its less caustic sibling and waits for the time to strike, returning periodically through life like an incurable disease.
Darrell Drake
...in January, everything seems desolate. The Moon ascends to cold heights - and I, a ragged sky filled with dark kisses...lie abandoned by you...
John Geddes
Darkness became her world...
Morgan Rhodes
Angels should never be exposed to the dire darkness of despair in the tunnel of cosmic nothingness, and although I never believed such maddening thoughts; I couldn't help but feel spiritual in her presence.
Bruce Crown
For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.
Yann Martel
I didn’t know what darkness was until I lost you
Sylvain Reynard
There were streetlights here, but they were so far apart and surrounded by trees that light dropped away to solid black between them. The skin on the back of his neck crawled as he became aware of the darkness. He didn't usually walk around after nightfall, but tonight he'd had no choice without his car. The wind lifted his hair, leaving him shivering; a voice in his mind chattered nervously.There was someone in my yard the other night...
Danika Stone
Doubt grew only in the fertile darkness of solitude
Michael R. Fletcher
When night comes, something speaksfrom that soft, fragrant wilderness.It says, the heart is not a door. But it opens.We feel in the dark for the hinge.
Carole Glasser Langille
Walking in darkness didn't mean having to become one with it, did it? Could we not live with our inner natures without embracing the true evil we all are privy to? Humans are no less evil than the worst of vampires at times. Surely right and wrong couldn't be so perfectly cut and dried.
Trina M. Lee
And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.
Douglas Coupland
Darkness shields as much as it threatens.
R. Scott Bakker
Darkness promotes speech.
Alberto Manguel
My dad had once told me, crimson-red deep in “the talk,” that with sons, all he had to worry about was one penis, but with a daughter, he had to worry about everyone else’s.
Nicole Williams
See? That’s it,” he said, waving his hand. “That’s part of what makes us so great, Luce. I’m crazy. You’re crazy. Together, we make our own brand of crazy.
Nicole Williams
Everyone was going crazy, like they’d just witnessed the birth of Jesus and the invention of electricity at the same time. Jude was a rock star, their savior, and they were paying him homage.
Nicole Williams
Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.
Margaret Atwood
I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didn't get it.
Cory Doctorow
I laugh. Yer crazy, I says.I was fine till I met you, he says.
Moira Young
Fighting with tangles,fighting with curls,the poor barber yanked,the poor barber pulled,until with one last effort(and to the wonder of us all)a GINORMOUS Polar Bearlanded on the floor.
Mili Fay
First her body goes missing, then her finger.
Bliss Addison
Damn there were days being a woman confused the hell out of her.- Aella
Eve Langlais
Sometimes we know people who aretoo wonderful for words. I am not one of them.Or you, for that matter, as you well know.
Michael Hogan
If you’ve never been in a men’s room, and have only set foot in the ladies’ room at most fine (and not so fine) establishments, you need to know this: store owners hate men. No, really—this is the one area where women get treated better. We may earn seventy-seven cents on the dollar compared to men, but, by God, our public bathrooms don’t look like something out of a Soviet-era prison. Or worse—a Sochi hotel during the Olympics.
Julia Kent
If I had echolocation I could map out the terrain of ab muscles through sheer force of will. His cut body is meant to be relief mapped the way Braille is meant to be read. With my fingertips.
Julia Kent
Josh is the company tech expert, which means we all think he’s a little bit shaman, a little bit magician, and mostly a nerd.
Julia Kent
Do you mind? Just drape your arm around her shoulder. That's it. Yes this is good, Mr.Henshaw. Getting your picture taken with Daphne is a great way to introduce you to our set. Welcome to Santa Lucia!
Barbara Jean Coast
People who think animals have expressionless faces are like people who can ignore an open package of Oreos. Not quite human.
Julia Kent
Now, invite me in, before I lose my temperature.’‘Temper, you mean.’‘No, temperature. It’s getting chilly.
Steven Erikson
She’s a kid. Nothing to be afraid of. You’ve faced scores of bloodthirsty enemy soldiers happily willing to die if it meant killing you. You can handle one little girl.”~ CalExcerpt From: Andrews, Keira. “Semper Fi.” iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
Keira Andrews
You're so dehydrated I can hear you blink.
Lori Lansens
Is that-am I looking at her beaver?"Mid-swig, I choke on the mouthful of beer, sputtering and coughing. After I recover, I ask jokingly, "'Beaver'? Are you Canadian or something?
Helena Hunting
Since the teachers weren't picking, I ended up with a boy with bad body odour. 'You should wear deodorant,' I said to him. 'And you should shut your trap,' he replied.
Lorna Schultz Nicholson
It sounded somewhat doom-laden, so I felt obliged to look it up more thoroughly, in case I should eat some chocolate rather quickly.
Carol Anne Dobson