Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 91

...don't be self-conscious - other people are completely unaware of you and more concerned with how they appear ...
John Geddes
True confidence is born of experiencing your hard work and seeing your determination pay off.
Lorii Myers
In its essence, faith is a confidence in the person of Jesus Christ and in His power, so that even when His power does not serve my end, my confidence in Him remains because of who He is.
Ravi Zacharias
Naturally, the plague of humanity named confidence (or pride to some), which symptoms often render each person to fiercely believe himself to be above average, let them to believe that it was others who were affected by this case but not them. Everyone thought they had the quintessential ability to detach themselves from the cases they were working, even if the victim looked and behaved exactly like their son, daughter, niece or nephew.
Bruce Crown
Confidence is something you feel before you truly understand the situation
Julie E Czerneda
That, my dear Liv, was confidence. Talk to someone. Make jokes with them. Seem interested in what they are saying even if they're dull as mud.” He shrugged. “Anyone... anyone at all, can be glamoured if you know how.
Danika Stone
You cannot become good enough for your own approval just like you can't become good enough to have hair. You cannot earn your own self-acceptance just like you can't earn your own ears. You can't become what you are. Stop looking out there. Look in the mirror. You're already everything you've ever wanted to be.
Vironika Tugaleva
I’m so used to planning for guys, dressing and undressing for them and trying to morph myself into their dream girl. I’m so used to it that I don’t really know where that girl ends and the real me begins. I suppose what it comes down to is confidence. I’m confident in that girl, the one who emerges from my walk-in wearing lingerie when I’m done getting ready. But at Faye’s house, I’m not going to be that girl. I’m going to be me. Whoever that is anymore.
Laurie Elizabeth Flynn
The more I thought about the reasons behind my insecurities, the more I realized that my issues with my appearance had nothing to do with reality. I didn’t feel fat because I was sluggish or unable to move my body with ease. I felt fat because I didn’t fit the mold of what society has taught me a woman should looklike.
Jenn Sadai
Often, we find ourselves wedged in the middle of a draining conversation. We might desperately want to dislodge ourselves from the interaction, but instead we stay in receiving mode, absorbing their words like a slow-acting poison.
Michaela Chung
We don't need to be in a designated role to take ownership of our environment. We can simply decide that we will be the giver, the helper, or the greeter wherever we are. We can even make a little game of it. We can tell ourselves: Today, I'm going to make at least three new people feel welcome. Or we can say: At this party, I'm going to gift two people a genuine compliment.
Michaela Chung
Wow, someone woke up on the wrong side of the Midol.
Denise Jaden
Your appearance, attitude, and confidence define you as a person.A professional, well-dressed golfer, like a businessperson, gives the impression that he thinks that the golf course and/or workplace and the people there are important.
Lorii Myers
My optimism and confidence come not from feeling I'm luckier than other mortals, and they sure don't come from visualizing victory. They're the result of a lifetime spent visualizing defeat and figuring out how to prevent it. Like most astronauts, I'm pretty sure that I can deal with what life throws at me because I've thought about what to do if things go wrong, as well as right. That's the power of negative thinking.
Chris Hadfield
You can't make yourself feel positive, but you can choose how to act, and if you choose right, it builds your confidence.
Julien Smith
Fulfill me, make me happy, make me feel safe, tell me who I am. The world cannot give you those things, and when you no longer have such expectations, all self created suffering comes to an end.
Eckhart Tolle
Suffering needs time. It cannot survive in the now.
Eckhart Tolle
You are certainly unique. Everyone is unique. Nobody has ever suffered quite like you before because nobody has ever been you before.
Robertson Davies
...it was inevitable I loved you - we were soul mates - for the same reason, we were fated to suffer...
John Geddes
...everything I treasure is broken - it's of no use to anybody but me...
John Geddes
...love is suffering - that's the happy ending...
John Geddes
...you go back to liberate the captives and sadly realize, some want to remain tied down in the cave...
John Geddes
...the real absurdity is that to love is to suffer, but the reverse isn't always true...
John Geddes
...it's always somebody's fault - I blame you for my helpless love - do you think I chose this? Your beauty compelled me...
John Geddes
...you can't rationalize suffering - it's indeterminate - the real unknowable variable God substitutes in...
John Geddes
Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry.
Yann Martel
I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me, no. I've had all the monstrosity I want.
Saul Bellow
I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once more. I do not see this. Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick. We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and th rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.
Saul Bellow
The world has long ceased to be the author of your anguish.
R. Scott Bakker
Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering the converse does. The brave who focus and all things good and all things beautiful to give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agent to bring the fullest night to all the world.
Ann Voskamp
With memories of gravestones, of combing fingers through tangled hair, I wonder too ... If the rent in the canvas of our life backdrop, the losses that puncture our world, and our own emptiness, might actually become places to see.To see through to God.That which tears open our souls, those holes which splatter sight, they actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart aching beauty beyond. To him. To the god whom we endlessly crave.But how? How do we choose to allow the holes to become seeing through to collect places? How do I give up resentment for gratitude, anger for spilling joy, so focus for God communion. To fully live to fully live grace enjoy with all that is beauty internal it is possible
Ann Voskamp
suffering breaks us until there’s nothing left but gentleness
John Geddes
Well, hope for your thrilling career - but remember that if there is to be drama in your life somebody must pay the piper in the coin of suffering. If not you - then someone else.
L.M. Montgomery
[Ilse] was suffering so keenly that she wanted to arraign the universe at the bar of her pain.
L.M. Montgomery
Somewhere along the road many of us have picked up the belief that to change we must suffer. Some things are earned with work. But work is not suffering. Work is just work.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer
It's a difficult truth to face that some people choose to define themselves by the pain they feel or the wrongs they've suffered. They're not going through hard times so much as making all times hard.
Dani Harper
Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers.
Eleanor Catton
But how to be present to another? Our hearts are so hard. We are so insensitive to the suffering of others. We must pray the Holy Spirit to change our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh so that we may give life, for love is giving of life and liberty. By our confidence in another we can bring forth new aspirations and a taste for life in him. We can help the miserable person to live, to progress and to grow. And he will only begin to want to live when he has been told by our gestures, words, the tone of our voice, our look, our whole being that it is important that he live.
Jean Vanier
When things are good, it is because we remember a time when they were not. When there was pain. But now the pain is gone, so things are ‘good’. When we hurt, it is because we recall a time when we did not. When there was no pain. But now we suffer, so things are ‘bad’. The tiger sipped from the cup, peering at the boy over the rim. Stars swirled in its eyes. “Good. Bad. The cup holds both.
Brooke Burgess
Our task is to take suffering in stride, not as if it is a pleasure (it isn’t), but in the knowledge that God will not let it overwhelm us and that He will use it, by His own supernatural alchemy, to three good ends, at least. 1) Our suffering produces character; 2) Our suffering glorifies God; 3) Suffering fulfills the law of the harvest (John 12:24), Rediscovering Holiness by J.I. Packer, pgs. 232-239.
J.I. Packer
They say we live in hard times. They say the world is full of suffering and pain and ignorance and violence. But is that not better than helpless, grinned and beared mediocrity? Is this not the time of opportunity? When will we learn the importance of peace, if not in war? When will we learn the importance of loving ourselves except through self-hatred? How else will we come together except to realize how we hurt when we are apart? The world is not full of horror. It is full of opportunity. It is not lacking in love. It is hungry for it. So eat. So feed.
Vironika Tugaleva
When most people think about the future, they dream up ways that they might live happier lives. But notice this phenomenon. When people remember the crucial events that formed them, they don't usually talk about happiness. It is usually the ordeals that seem most significant. Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering.
David Brooks
All of this,' the prophet said, serene, 'all of our activities, Sayid, you must understand this, all of your suffering, it's all part of a greater plan.''You'd be surprised at how little comfort I take from that notion.
Emily St. John Mandel
Our sin is our resistance to going along with God's initiative in making suffering reparative. We are deeply drawn towards God, but we also sense how following him will dislocate and transform beyond recognition the forms which have made life tolerable for us. We often react with fear, dismay, hostility. We are at war with ourselves, and responding differently to this inner conflict, we end up at war with each other. So it is undoubtedly true that the result of sin is much suffering. But this is by no means distributed according to desert. Many who are relatively innocent are swept up in this suffering, and some of the worse offenders get off lightly. The proper response to all this is not retrospective book-keeping, but making ourselves capable of responding to God's initiative. But now if that's what sin is, then one can sympathize with a lot of the modern critique of a religion which focuses on the evil tendencies of human nature, and the need for renunciation and sacrifice. This is not because humans are in fact angelic, or there is no point to sacrifice. It's just that focusing on how bad human beings can be, even if it's to refute the often over-rosy views of secular humanists with their reliance on human malleability and therapy, can only strengthen misanthropy, which certainly won’t bring you closer to God; and propounding sacrifice and renunciation for themselves takes you away from the main points, which is following God's initiative. That this can involve sacrifice, we well know from the charter act in this initiative, but renunciation is not is point.
Charles Taylor
Ageing is not easy, Sennhora Castro. It's a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology. It starts well. It's a most desirable disease. One wouldn't want to do without it. It's like yeast that corrupts the juice of grapes. One loves, one loves, one persists in loving-the incubation period can be very long- and then, with death, comes the heart break. Love must always meet its unwanted end.
Yann Martel
If God has entrusted us with suffering, let us set our hearts and minds to work together with Him to enable Him to bring out of our trials all the glory He longs us to know.
Margaret Clarkson
To be wounded by the suffering of others is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
Gregory Baum
On accepting adversity in our lives: Always it is initiated by an act of will on our part; we set ourselves to believe in the overruling goodness, providence, and sovereignty of God and refuse to turn aside no matter what may come, no matter how we may feel. I mistakenly thought I could not trust God unless I felt like trusting Him. Now I am learning that trusting God is first of all a matter of the will. I choose to trust in God, and my feelings eventually follow.
Margaret Clarkson
That which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave.
Ann Voskamp
The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one's one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.
Mary Balogh
Goodbye, Room." I wave up at Skylight. "Say goodbye," I tell Ma. "Goodbye, Room."Ma says it but on mute.I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.
Emma Donoghue
God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives. Felt weakness deepens dependence on Christ for strength each day. The weaker we feel, the harder we lean. And the harder we lean, the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies waste away. To live with your ‘thorn’ uncomplainingly — that is, sweet, patient, and free in heart to love and help others, even though every day you feel weak — is true sanctification. It is true healing for the spirit. It is a supreme victory of grace.
J.I. Packer
...the wounds of the past and the scars of the present don't disfigure me in your eyes - because you know the price I pay for loving you ...
John Geddes
...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...
John Geddes
The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?
Ruth Ozeki
In the days when wishing was having, I got what I wished and then I wish I hadn't.
Emma Donoghue
There's some wounds that run too deep to be seen. They're the most dangerous.
Moira Young
I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.
Margaret Atwood
I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
Margaret Atwood
you can't change the past,Aunt Lou used to say.Oh, but I wanted to;that was the one thing I really wanted to do
Margaret Atwood