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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween."
"Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky."
"You mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly..."
"The palliative care nurses welcome him: he's a spot of brightness, they claim he keeps the patients interested in life. "We don't think of the clients here as dying," one of them said to him on his first visit. "After all everyone's dying, just some of us more slowly."
"No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well."
"In winter the very ground seemed to reach up and grab the elderly, yanking them to earth as though hungry for them."
"Why is this government so insensitive to the concerns of the middle-class people?"
"Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there's something dead about it, something deserted."
"We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young."
"We have a solemn pact.' Kaye nodded to Mother and looked over at Em talking to some neighbors. 'If one of us is unconscious in the hospital, the others will make sure it's pulled.''The plug?' Ruth asked.'The chin hair,' said Kaye, eyeing Ruth with some alarm. 'You're off the visitors list. Mother, make a note."
"When someone stabs you it's not your fault that you feel pain."
"Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories."
"I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored for even further embarrassment under a box of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I told him I owned nothing of any value."
"Well, it all comes to this, there's no use trying to live in other people's opinions. The only thing to do is to live in our own."
"I feel as if something has been torn suddenly out of my life and left a terrible hole. I feel as if I couldn't be I - as if I must have changed into somebody else and couldn't get used to it. It gives me a horrible lonely, dazed, helpless feeling. It's good to see you again - it seems as if you were a sort of anchor for my drifting soul."
"After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared."
"Positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women's rights, children's rights, and gay rights, which began to consolidate power in the 1990s as the baby boomers became the establishment. Their targeting of rape, battering, hate crimes, gay-bashing, and child abuse reframed law-and-order from a reactionary cause to a progressive one, and their efforts to make the home, workplace, schools, and streets safer for vulnerable groups (as in the feminist "Take Back the Night protests) made these environments safer for everyone."
"Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know."
"Tyranny is the wolf cast by the shadows of sheep."
"You have to see a building to comprehend it. Photographs cannot convey the experience, nor film."
"There's a time when it all comes together-what you long for and what you fear-and as tentative as you may feel, you're driven to continue. At that point, the need to forge ahead is the only option, and your direction is defined despite yourself."
"Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently."
"Our horizon is the creation of a noble society to which, like the medieval builder of those glorious cathedrals, you will have added your conception, your artful piece of stone."
"When I think of excellence in motion, I think of the big picture. Because of the magnitude of this concept, I look at it from an aerial perspective. It is a mindset that challenges the boundaries of self-induced limits-that point where you aspire to exceed your expectations, where the mind-body-achievement connection resides and wins time and time again."
"Yeah. She'd manipulated the second most powerful vampire in town into taking her side against a psycho bitch-queen sorority girl. She'd talked rationally about putting people's brains into computers. This was a normal day. No wonder she was screwed up."
"Good words - that triumphalism of positivity- but life will claw and eat you - chew you over and over - if you carry such a small knife ..."
"I am a hunter of beauty and I move slow and I keep the eyes wide, every fiber of every muscle sensing all wonder and this is the thrill of the hunt and I could be an expert on the life full, the beauty meat that lurks in every moment.I hunger to taste life.God."
"True confidence is born of experiencing your hard work and seeing your determination pay off."
"Friendship, like other kinds of altruism, is vulnerable to cheaters, and we have a special name for them: fair-weather friends. These sham friends reap the benefits of associating with a valuable person and mimic signs of warmth in an effort to become valued themselves. But when a little rain falls, they are nowhere in sight."
"One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, they often slid back into warfare, this time intensified by modern weaponry, organized militias, and the freedom of young men to defy tribal elders.77 As we shall see in the next chapter, this development is a countercurrent to the historical decline of violence, but it is also a demonstration of the role of Leviathans in propelling the decline."
"This will be a winter so desolate, only memory can fill the emptiness."
"One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end."
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