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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"Those who make conversations impossible, make escalation inevitable."
"True saints know that the place where all the joy comes from is far deeper than that of feelings, joy comes from the place of the very presence of God. Joy is God and God is joy and joy doesn't negate all other emotions - joy transcends all other emotions."
"I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works."
"I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room."
"You can use words if you wish, but I'm warning you - I've learned how to read your heart ..."
"Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance."
"Perhaps we should rejoice that people's emotions aren't designed for the good of the group. Often the best way to benefit one's group is to displace, subjugate, or annihilate the group next door. Ants in a colony are closely related, and each is a paragon of unselfishness. That's why ants are one of the few kinds of animal that wage war and take slaves. When human leaders have manipulated or coerced people into submerging their interests into the group's, the outcomes are some of the history's worst atrocities."
"I don't want to talk as much,' she said, denting her chin thoughtfully with her forefinger. 'It's nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one's heart, like treasures."
"After The Matrix, I cannot wear sunglasses. As soon as I put them on, people recognize me."
"We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time."
"Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car."
"Did you know that in your eyes there are bright flecks of green and orange - and that they are lovely?..."
"I'm the last person to ask about unrequited love - I've run away to the Moon and fled to its valleys..."
"You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?"
"Here's a tip...If you leave a girl crying you're probably not doing your Don Juan routine right, asshole."
"Most of the women who have offered themselves for public office over the years have done so, I believe, more because of the 'dirt' than in spite of it."
"I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened."
"And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened."
"You are a ring tone on the phone I didn't answer."
"If you can sit in silence with a person for half an hour and yet be entirely comfortable, you and that person can be friends. If you cannot, friends you'll never be and you need not waste time in trying."
"At first happiness might seem like just desserts for biological fitness (more accurately, the states that would have led to fitness in the environment in which we evolved). We are happier when we are healthy, well-fed, comfortable, safe, prosperous, knowledgeable, respected, non-celibate, and loved. Compared to their opposites, these objects of striving are conducive to reproduction. The function of happiness would be to mobilize the mind to seek the keys to Darwinian fitness. When we are unhappy, we work for the things that make us happy; when we are happy, we keep the status quo. The problem is, how much fitness is worth striving for?"
"We go on and on about our differences. But, you know, our differences are less important than our similarities. People have a lot in common with one another, whether they see that or not."
"I committed a sin the day I refused you - I discovered metal inside me where my heart should be - forgive me, Love, for acting on principles..."
"Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking vegetable juice and having ultrasound treatments, in search of her original face, the one she knows is under there somewhere; she comes back feeling toned up and virtuous, and hungry."
"A suffering or tortured animal always filled her with such a surge of sympathy that it lifted her clean out of herself."
"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made."
"We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young."
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