Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 95

......and not out of fear or loneliness, but only to find myself again... for we have come too far my Life, to turn back now...
John Geddes
...across the snowy field the barn light gleams - it's the loneliness of November twilight...
John Geddes
And tonight I'm feelin like an astronaut, sending sos from this tiny box,and i lost the signal when i lifted off, now i'm stuck up here and the world forgot, can i please come down? Cuz i'm tired of drifting round and round....can i please come down? Now I lie awake and scream in my zero gravity...and its starting to weigh down on me....lets abort this mission now....CAN I PLEASE COME DOWN? So tonight I'm calling all the astronauts, all the lonely people that the world forgot, if you hear my voice, come pick me up, cuz ur all i've got...
Simple Plan
The Loneliness of the Military HistorianConfess: it's my professionthat alarms you.This is why few people ask me to dinner,though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary.I wear dresses of sensible cutand unalarming shades of beige,I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's:no prophetess mane of mine,complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.If I roll my eyes and mutter,if I clutch at my heart and scream in horrorlike a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,I do it in private and nobody seesbut the bathroom mirror.In general I might agree with you:women should not contemplate war,should not weigh tactics impart
Margaret Atwood
A half-dead thing in a stark dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold.
Robert W. Service
I wasn't lonely. Loneliness, I think, has very little to do with location. It's a state of mind. In the centre of every city are some of the loneliest people in the world. If anything, because our whole planet was just outside the window, I felt even more aware of and connected to the seven billion other people who call it home.
Chris Hadfield
In any ten step instruction manual and every book of doctrines, there is complex advice that serves the very simple function of helping the lonely person find some similarity with the world around him.He connects and, suddenly, there is a burst of joy, a ray of hope. He believes that it was those steps or that book, specifically, that brought him happiness, when really he has simply been triggered into his natural state.
Vironika Tugaleva
I write small poems— the kind that fit on a postcard… and still can break your heart
John Geddes
He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone.
Eleanor Catton
The return of solitude was not quite as Dina expected it to be. These many years I made a virtue of inescapable reality, she thought, calling it peace and quiet.
Rohinton Mistry
We are like puzzle pieces who are perfectly suited to make a giant picture together, but we are assembling ourselves in the dark.
Vironika Tugaleva
I’m not the only kid who grew up this way. Surrounded by people who used to say that rhyme about sticks and stones. As if broken bones hurt more than the names we got called, and we got called them all. So we grew up believing no one would ever fall in love with us. That we’d be lonely forever. That we’d never meet someone to make us feel like the sun was something they built for us in their tool shed. So broken heart strings bled the blues as we tried to empty ourselves so we would feel nothing. Don’t tell me that hurts less than a broken bone.
Shane L. Koyczan
What could he be thinking of? He seemed to be trying to remember something, perhaps an engagement, perhaps an excuse to leave her. For eventually, they all made some excuse.
Brian Moore
And the bell jangled, the driver started. The bus whirled off, to the last stop, the lonely room, the lonely night.
Brian Moore
If solitude feels painful, it's only because we don't know how to be alone.
Michael Harris
There's something I want to say in this space, but it's an emptiness where there's usually a hug. — Colin Morton to Mary Lee Bragg, 1972
David Eso
The Idea of Ghost, like the Idea of North. A mere looped whisper, in darkness or in light. And no matter what this person may have been like before he or she died, no matter what they--specifically--might have wanted, ghosts only really want one thing: you, with them.Not to be alone. Not to be trapped. Not to be where they are. Not to be.
Gemma Files
We all say we hate being misunderstood and how we desperately want to find people who understand us. But it is not lack of compatible people that keeps us lonely. There is no shortage of people on your journey. The real, secret obstacle that we have against finding authentic, genuine relationships with people is our subconscious fear of growth. If we stick around in the bin of broken toys playing the queen or the king, at least we get to feel some sense of accomplishment at being the most evolved person we know. To find our tribe means finding people we can learn from, people who are better at some things than we are, people who have something to teach. We say we want it, but how many of us fear being a beginner more than loneliness and much more than being in the wrong crowd? There is a strange comfort, a sense of safety, to suffering and loneliness. To be happy, to find our family, we must be willing to let that go.
Vironika Tugaleva
The mainland can stretch until it breaks at the weakest points, and those weaknesses are called faults. Each island represented a victory and a defeat: it had either pulled itself free or pulled too hard and found itself alone. Later, as these islands grew older, they turned their misfortune into virtue, learned to accept their cragginess, their misshapen coasts, ragged where they'd been torn. They acquired grace.
Anne Michaels
I realised I really was shy. And once I was in it, I couldn't escape. I'd go to talk and find my face was made of cement. Nothing would come out. On winter days, I'd feel myself turning grey at the edges and fading into the walls.Was this defensive strategy? It was paralysing. And it went on for years.
Janet E. Cameron
Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
Margaret Atwood
I’m mad with loneliness and you’ve been haunting me all day
John J. Geddes
my heart, sometimes singing in the afternoon, the most haunting song of solitude
John J. Geddes
When we suffer in silence, we think that we are alone, different, separate. When we share our stories of suffering, we find that we are the same.
Vironika Tugaleva
And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know.
Alice Munro
To be so lonelyyou told yourself you liked to be this way& almost believed it was true.
Natalie Wee
A teacher I once had told me that the older you get, the lonelier you become and the deeper the love you need. Loneliness creates an appetite for deeper love, and the entire predicament deepens. And as a result of suffering, your capacity to love deeply increases.
Leonard Cohen
What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time.
Rachel Cusk
Something happens when you are alone most of the time, when there are no distractions. Your mind grows more powerful--muscular, even. It takes over and starts to carry you.
Amanda Lindhout
I always come here when I can't sleep [. . .] every night.
Faith Erin Hicks
I looked briefly up from my notes. I was surrounded by hearts, sectioned and preserved. Hearts with holes. Hearts with leaking valves or thickened walls. Hearts with narrow or transposed aortas. I closed my eyes.
Claire Holden Rothman
Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.
Margaret Atwood
She had never before minded being alone. Now she dreaded it. When she was alone now she felt so dreadfully alone.
L.M. Montgomery
There's a lot to be said for being alone. But you and I know, don't we, Flavia, that being alone and being lonely are not at all the same thing?
Alan Bradley
I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.
Douglas Coupland
I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.
Rachel Hartman
The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself.
Mary Balogh
God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all—no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals nor how orthodox are their creeds and confessions.
Ronald J. Sider
What an ironic tragedy that an affluent, “Christian” minority in the world continues to hoard its wealth while hundreds of millions of people hover on the edge of starvation!
Ronald J. Sider
It is a sinful abomination for one part of the world's Christians to grow richer year by year while our brothers and sisters ache and suffer for lack of minimal health care, minimal education, and even—in some cases—enough food to escape starvation.
Ronald J. Sider
Wealth can be created. Wit and intelligence can't.
Nicole Williams
Real poverty is when hunger pangs force from my mind all thoughts but those of food. Real poverty is when the children are not dressed warmly enough for winter. Real poverty is when the housing we can afford is not adequate to the needs of our families. On the other hand, real poverty is - equally - when I have eaten so much that I am uncomfortable, and again, my thoughts center on food. Or when I have so many clothes that I have to spend a lot of mental energy making choices among them or finding ways to store them. Or when, regardless of my living conditions, I am discontent and brooding about how to have more. Real poverty is when material things are uppermost and pressing - whether because we have too few or too many of them. It is poverty, because the human mind and spirit are made for higher things, worthier pursuits.
Maxine Hancock
For the prosperous, it's not about getting more stuff. It's about having the freedom to make almost any decision you want.
T. Harv Eker
Those born in the poorest quarter of American society have an 8% chance of earning a college degree. Those born in the wealthiest quarter of American society have a 75% chance of earning a college degree.
David Brooks
The only thing money really buys?...Space. A bigger house, a bigger car, a larger hotel room. First-class plane tickets. But it doesn't even buy comfort. No one complains more than the rich and entitled. Comfort, security, ease. None of them come with money.
Louise Penny
With deregulation, privatisation, free trade, what we're seeing is yet another enclosure and, if you like, private taking of the commons. One of the things I find very interesting in our current debates is this concept of who creates wealth. That wealth is only created when it's owned privately. What would you call clean water, fresh air, a safe environment? Are they not a form of wealth? And why does it only become wealth when some entity puts a fence around it and declares it private property? Well, you know, that's not wealth creation. That's wealth usurpation.
Elaine Bernard
Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows they to be noble. They don't really have to think about it much; they sprout benevolent acts the way trees sprout leaves.
Margaret Atwood
We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The size of the problem is never the issue -- what matters is the size of you!
T. Harv Eker
Your income can grow only to the extent that you do.
T. Harv Eker
The world doesn’t need more people playing small. It’s time to stop hiding out and start stepping out. It’s time to stop needing and start leading. It’s time to start sharing your gifts instead of hoarding them or pretending they don’t exist. It’s time you started playing the game of life in a “big” way.
T. Harv Eker
People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity.
Douglas Coupland
A community that is growing rich and seeks only to defend its goods and its reputation is dying. It has ceased to grow in love. A community is alive when it is poor and its members feel they have to work together and remain united, if only to ensure that they can all eat tomorrow!
Jean Vanier
...Individualistic material progress and the desire to gain prestige by coming out on top have taken over from the sense of fellowship, compassion and community. Now people live more or less on their own in a small house, jealously guarding their goods and planning to acquire more, with a notice on the gate that says, 'Beware of the Dog.
Jean Vanier
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
John Kenneth Galbraith
When people love each other, they are content with very little. When we have light and joy in our hearts, we don't need material wealth. The most loving communities are often the poorest. If our own life is luxurious and wasteful, we can't approach poor people. If we love people, we want to identify with them and share with them.
Jean Vanier
If you are willing to do only what’s easy, life will be hard. But if you are willing to do what’s hard, life will be easy.
T. Harv Eker
There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos; yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the strife of Nature itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls, and regulates, and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seem only to threaten despair and subversion.
William Gibson
...Heracles was strangely silent. What is he thinking? / Geryon wondered. / Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts. / Even when they were lovers / he had never known what Herakles was thinking. Once in a while he would say, / Penny for your thoughts! / and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish / he'd eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago. / What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them / developed a dangerous cloud.
Anne Carson
...all kinds of images swim like tropical fish in the bathysphere inside my skull ...
John Geddes