top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Canadian Authors
"Well, I don't want to be anyone but myself, even if I go uncomforted by diamonds all my life,' declared Anne. 'I'm quite content to be Anne of Green Gables, with my string of pearl beads."
"The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. A good-natured smile is forever on its lips...I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at a sloth in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of scientific probing."
"Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next."
"The vast majority of people are unthinking prejudice machines."
"She wondered if old dreams could haunt rooms - if, when one left forever the room where she had joyed and suffered and laughed and wept, something of her, intangible and invisible, yet nonetheless real, did not remain behind like a voiceful memory."
"It's tough being AWESOME all the time, but the kids need someone to look up to!"
"Is there no end to his diguises of benevolence?"
"We have won the time lottery of the last 4 billion years."
"Claire hated to say it, but she knew the answer, in her heart. "Because he feels something for me, and he wanted to give me a chance to live. Like him. With him. But I refused.Shane turned and looked at her, a blank expression on his face that turned quickly into . . . something else. Claire was glad Myrnin had gotten out while he still could. "Great, he said. "I knew it."It's not like that. He's- She shook her head in frustration. "It's not like he's in love with me or anything; it's more complicated than that. I don't even think he understands it, exactly."Yeah, he only loves you for your mind, Shane said..."
"If she were any friendlier, she'd be giving you a lapdance right now."
"Your success is your responsibility. Take the initiative, do the work, and persist to the end."
"I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry and I think it's nicer' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed 'to look at it through poetry."
"You're not eating anything," said Marilla sharply, eying her as if it were a serious shortcoming. Anne sighed. I can't. I'm in the depths of despair. Can you eat whenyou are in the depths of despair?"I've never been in the depths of despair, so I can't say," responded Marilla. Weren't you? Well, did you ever try to IMAGINE you were inthe depths of despair?"No, I didn't."Then I don't think you can understand what it's like. It's very uncomfortable a feeling indeed."
"I write small poems- the kind that fit on a postcard, and still can break your heart."
"I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect."
"Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it."
"A situation only has the power over us that we give it. We own the power over ourselves! We own that! No one else! When we realize that: we now have a CHOICE we can make, we can STOP giving that power away! Own yourself. Own YOUR power!"
"I've seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly; they can't kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I've seen humans die from smoking them; if I were you I would stop smoking them."Why should I? You smoke 'em all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes, Mandy pointed out."Yeah, I started doing that back in the Sixties, for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes, but I'm not a person, I'm Pollution, things like that aren't dangerous to me but they are to you, Alecto told her. "It's not a good idea."
"What are the messages that you are entertaining?"
"That icy glass reduces your beauty - dims your fire - let me be your mirror..."
"Well, friend, I don't know about your tastes, but I tend to like it very bloody, Myrnin said. He shifted position, dragging Claire along like a rag doll without any effort at all. "Have we been introduced?"Probably not. Why, are you asking me out, sweetheart?"You're not my type, darling. Is this one yours?"No, Frank said, and looked at Shane, just in a quick flicker. "Let's say she's a friend of the family."
"It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?"
"Want LESS! Need LESS! Live MORE!"
"Amanda, you finally decided to answer the phone, her mom exclaimed after picking up at the first ring. "Where've you been, what've you been up to?"Mom, do you remember when I was a kid, I had a friend, he was a Personification of the Sydney Tar Ponds, sort of my imaginary friend? Mandy asked."No, what in the name of god are you on about? her mom sighed in exasperation."Remember? Only I could see him, but he was real and he was my best friend when I was eighteen? Mandy insisted."No, I don't remember Alecto Sydney Steele at all, said her mom all too quickly."
"Why do people venerate Einstein or Bill Gates? Clive Bell explains: Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age...."
"Put out the candles with your fire-I'm on fire."
"My dreams are tangled in images of stars and clouds and firelight - we go camping at night - it's my lucid dream of being with you..."
"The strands that connect us are frail, so don't hang great weights on slender wires..."
"I had a good teacher.""Better not have been Myrnin or I'll have to kick his predatory ass.""I mean you, dummy."
"I never really grew up until I had kids."
"Thanksgiving-giving thanks in everything-prepares the way that God might show us His fullest salvation in Christ."
"The Loneliness of the Military HistorianConfess: it's my professionthat alarms you.This is why few people ask me to dinner,though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary.I wear dresses of sensible cutand unalarming shades of beige,I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's:no prophetess mane of mine,complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.If I roll my eyes and mutter,if I clutch at my heart and scream in horrorlike a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,I do it in private and nobody seesbut the bathroom mirror.In general I might agree with you:women should not contemplate war,should not weigh tactics impart."
"Then the immortal heart of the woods will beat against ours and its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own forever, so that no matter where we go or how widely we wander we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship."
"Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world."
"A man goes to a foreign country and kills somebody who's not aggressing against him; in a Hawaiian shirt he's a criminal, in a green costume he's a hero who gets a parade and a pension. So that, as a culture, we remain in a state of moral insanity. To point out these contradictions to people in society is to be labeled insane. This is how insane society remains, that anybody who points out logical opposites in the most essential human topic of ethics, is considered to be insane."
"Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you."
"I believe that a contract, or at least an understanding, exists between the American public and the American advertiser concerning what advertising is, what its limitations are and what price people will pay for it."
"That's very rude," Myrnin said. "I haven't brought my fangs our for some time. Not in mixed company, anyway."
"History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances."
bottom of page