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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"I saw a lot of men die there. Most men. Do you know what killed them? Despair, said Finney. 'They believed themselves to be prisoners. I lived with those men, ate the same maggot-infested food, slept in the same beds, did the same back-breaking work. But they died and I lived. Do you know why? 'You were free. 'I was free. Milton was right the mind is its own place. I was never a prisoner. Not then, not now."
"Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy."
"Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does."
"It had been drilled into us that to feel fear is to not fully trust God. Whoever made that up has never been beneath a cafeteria table with a tiny thread of someone else's blood trickling onto their leg."
"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."
"Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette."
"Life is warped. I'm just in sync."
"We are both going to pray that we may live together all our lives and die the same day."
"A lot of what we know to be history isn't it serves a purpose. Events are exaggerated, heroes fabricated, goals are rewritten to appear more noble than they actually were. All to manipulate public opinion, to manufacture a common purpose or enemy. And the cornerstone of a really great movement? A powerful symbol. Take away or tarnish that and everything starts to crumble, everything's questioned."
"Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a person's bookcase and their grocery cart, she'd pretty much know who they were."
"It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had."
"I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won't."
"From under the ground, from under the waters,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won't let go."
"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."
"Michael...Michael got bitten. And now he's a vampire. But he doesn't remember becoming one, and that's a big problem. So if you see him, don't, you know, hug. He bites. He doesn't mean it, though."
"I am never taking a trip with either of you ever again.' Eve said. 'Ever.'Excellent' Shane said. 'Then next trip, we hit the strip bar.'I have a gun, Shane,' Eve sighed.What, you think i actually loaded yours?'Eve flipped him off, and Claire laughed."
"I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life they merely get used to it."
"It was the challenge of life too, was it not? People could never be fully understood. They were ever changing, different people at different times and under different circumstances and influences. And always growing, always creating themselves anew.How impossible it was to know another human being.How impossible to know even oneself."
"To desire to change one's past means there is a desire to change oneself. To desire to change oneself, one must learn to change."
"Was he a pleasant man hiding behind a mask of seeming carelessness or an unpleasant man hiding behind a mask of charm & smiles? Or like most humans, was he a dizzying mix of contradictory charactersticks?"
"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."
"Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning."
"I like doing radio because it's so intimate. The moment people hear your voice, you're inside there heads, not only that, you're in there laying eggs."
"It has been a Prosy day for us, but for some people it has been a wonderful day. Someone was rapturously happy in it. Perhaps a great deed has been done somewhere today- a great poem written- or a great man born. And some heart has been broken, Phil."
"All money does with an empty heart is allow you to be miserable in style."
"Believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade."
"With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption."
"Expectations are made to be exceeded!"
"The government is ethics rape in perpetuity."
"Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return."
"All kinds of images swim like tropical fish in the bathysphere inside my skull ..."
"These days, "getting lucky means drinking an entire cup of COFFEE while it's still HOT!"
"Instead of asking, "Why is there war? we might ask, "Why is there peace? We can obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right. Because we have been doing something right, and it would be good to know what, exactly, it is."
"What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves - our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies."
"America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself."
"Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine."
"I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them."
"Remember, no one can read your mind. People's actions or lack of, are not always purposeful. If you have a problem that you wish solved, you must communicate it. If you don't want to communicate your problem, then you also give away your right to worry, stress or complain about it. You are accountable for yourself."
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