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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"I gave you painted air - tears I couldn't weep - truths I couldn't speak - all the words that caught in my throat..."
"I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them."
"Speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks."
"Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky."
"She was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way she was gleeful, as if this was what she had been expecting for some time and now she'd been proven right."
"Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and freeWhether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a treeOr rolled in the arms of some nymph of the seaWhich is where we would all like to be, man!"
"Yes, the experience of all stages of life are valuable, not just of youth."
"I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened."
"More than ever at that instant did she long for speech - speech that would conceal and protect where dangerous silence might betray."
"I learn about the sacred in the everyday - I look in your face..."
"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."
"That's one of the things we learn as we grow older -- how to forgive. It comes easier at forty than it did at twenty."
"We are both going to pray that we may live together all our lives and die the same day."
"I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more."
"We have to stress our conservative credentials and emphasize that we are the natural, national alternative to the Liberals. Clearly the Alliance has shown it can't break out of its Western box. The Alliance is at single-digit support in three quarters of the country."
"There are two kinds of people; those who are always well and those who are always sick. Most of the evils of the world come from the first sort and most of the achievement from the second."
"Community begins in mystery and ends in administration. Leaders move away from people and into paper."
"I thought I knew not only her habits but also her limits. This display of ferocity, of savage courage, made me realize that I was wrong. All my life I had known only a part of her."
"(To the haters) You are not extinguishing the bright lights of mankind, you're simply burying yourself in an unmarked grave."
"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."
"We live in the same city but don't see the same things - you see buildings and I see memories..."
"We were revisionists, what we revised was ourselves."
"Today. the celebration is for the 'victorious', not the meritorious. The depiction to the youth, is that one can be victorious without merit, and that merit is less notable than victory. The result, is the masses are selectively and passively affirming that winning trumps hard work, that theft trumps the pride of ownership, and that personal success trumps collective progress."
"He thought the library door would never open again, but that he would be left to live out the rest of his life rooted to the spot on the library carpet, afraid to move a muscle lest the house fall upon his shoulders. He deliberately shrugged them and shuffled his feel just to prove to himself that it could be done."
"Writers, like priests, should have compassion...and a sensitivity to pain..."
"The greater the gap between self perception and reality, the more aggression is unleashed on those who point out the discrepancy."
"I am quite likely to re-act to the opposite extreme - to feel rapturously that the world is beautiful and mere existence something to thank God for. I suppose our 'blues' are the price we have to pay for our temperament. 'The gods don't allow us to be in their debt.' They give us sensitiveness to beauty in all its forms but the shadow of the gift goes with it."
"Most young men are such bores. They haven't lived long enough to learn that they are not the wonders to the world they are to their mothers."
"You have to see a building to comprehend it. Photographs cannot convey the experience, nor film."
"Your attitude defines your personality. Your personality refines your attitude. Together they make up your character."
"Changes ain't totally pleasant but they're excellent things... Two years is about long enough for things to stay exactly the same. If they stayed put any longer they might grow mossy."
"In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?"
"Sometimes the MOM who's always there for everyone else, needs someone to be there for HER."
"I went up on the hill and walked about until twilight had deepened into an autumn night with a benediction of starry quietude over it. I was alone but not lonely. I was a queen in halls of fancy."
"All kinds of images swim like tropical fish in the bathysphere inside my skull ..."
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