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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"There is no such thing as freedom on earth," he said. "Only different kinds of bondages. And comparative bondages. YOU think you are free now because you've escaped from a peculiarly unbreakable kind of bondage. But are you? You love me - THAT'S a bondage."
"Poetry is paying attention to life when all the world seems asleep to its beauties and truths..."
"Are you living in the moment?"
"Don't read it. Just shred and burn, or your eyes will melt."
"Sustenance! Your health is always the best prescription."
"Common sense is a tool that isn't in everyone's shed."
"The day they put me in the net I had a good game. I've stayed there since."
"Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one's savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later."
"I don't like psychiatrists, Alecto told her. "Not because they don't think I'm real, but because they have no idea what they're doing."
"Terrell is weeping soundlessly, and despite the guard's objection, he raises his hand up to the glass. Geraldine mimics him, lining her fingers up with his. It's lonely to think that one little sheet of glass could create such a thick distance between them, but all the same, regardless of what he's done, he's still one of the closest friends she has."
"Envy comes from people's ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts."
"Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you."
"She put her hands together and Saul hoped she wasn't about to say-'Namaste,' said CC, bowing. 'He taught me that. Very spiritual.'She said 'spiritual' so often it had become meaningless to Saul.'He said, CC Das, you have a great spiritual gift. You must leave this place and share it with the world. You must tell people to be calm.'As she spoke Saul mouthed the words, lip-synching to the familiar tune.'CC Das, he said, you above all others know that when the chakras are in alignment all is white. And when all is white, all is right.'Saul wondered whether she was confusing an Indian mystic with a KKK member. Ironic, really, if she was."
"The making of stories is only one part of my craft -mainly, I'm a heart whisperer..."
"It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable."
"Chronocanine Envy:Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forward."
"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."
"You carry your country with you, it's part of your baggage."
"You know I love you. You're the only one.""She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them."
"Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it's an assault on citizenship."
"To want is to have a weakness."
"But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge."
"She knew that kindness kills. All her life she'd suspected this and so she'd only ever been cold and cruel. She'd faced kindness with cutting remarks. She'd curled her lips at smiling faces. She'd twisted every thoughtful, considerate act into an assault. Everyone who was nice to her, who was compassionate and loving, she rebuffed.Because she'd loved them. Loved them with all her heart, and wouldn't see them hurt. Because she'd known all her life that the surest way to hurt someone, to maim and cripple them, was to be kind. If people were exposed, they die. Best to teach them to be armored, even if it meant she herself was forever alone. Sealed off from human touch."
"For 200 years we've been conquering nature. Now we're beating it to death."
"No phenomenon can be isolated, but has repercussions through every aspect of our lives. We are learning that we are a fundamental part of nature's ecosystems."
"Don't settle for pap - our thoughts wander through eternity - experience the wonder of being alive..."
"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."
"Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. Children may be innately motivated to make friends, acquire status, hone motor skills, and explore the physical world, but they are not necessarily motivated to adapt their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like formal mathematics. A family, peer group, and culture that ascribe high status to school achievement may be needed to give a child the motive to persevere toward effortful feats of learning whose rewards are apparent only over the long term."
"Alecto— what do you think would happen if people found out about you? Your abilities, your life, Mearth's super 8 films, those powers of yours— how would they react?" I don't know, said Alecto, "but ordinary people like a show, especially when it's a disturbing one. They enjoy seeing misery— probably because it allows them to pretend that they themselves are not so miserable, too. Also, they would probably find out about you, how you know about Personifications, how you saw the films— they would put us in cages and throw peanuts at us, I guess." All joking aside, Alecto.—"Who is joking, Mandy Valems?"
"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."
"He was a nice guy, middle-aged, a little tired, like most doctors usually seemed to be, but he just nodded and said, "Let me take a look at him. Shane?""I'm not dropping my pants," Shane said. "I just thought I'd say that up front."
"We don't know where we're going, but isn't is fun to go?"
"In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander the Great, and widely used in Mediterranean empires."
"Bullying is an attack upon the runts of the litter - the weak of the species, and it is predicated on a lack of bond with the parents. If a child has a secure bond with the parents, that forms a force-field around the child in terms of bullying. If the child does not have a strong bond with the parents, then it's like being separated from the herd - those are the ones who get picked off by the human predators in childhood and adulthood. So keep your contacts as close as you can, they provide an amazing shield against bullies and users."
"It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor will ever pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them."
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