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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away."
"You noticed that I wore this outfit twice? Why, the only thing you wear twice is a sour expression."
"There's a good reason for everything, ain't there?"
"Oh, this is the most TRAGICAL thing that ever happened to me!"
"One thing you learn early growing up a girl--people always talk, whatever you do,' Glain said. 'What bliss it must be to be male."
"I think we ought to find something else to do, said Mandy. "But Alecto my love, you're the first person to notice my retro diner kitchen. When my parents saw it, they thought I was creating a weird art project."I like it. It's got that let's-drown-ourselves-in-better-days type ambiance, Alecto declared, his gray eyes narrowed."
"The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member."
"Oh, Claire," he said. "You think me a far better man than I am. That's kind, and flattering." "Are you saying that you -""Doughnuts!" Myrnin interrupted her and darted away, to zip back in seconds with an open box."
"It was a show that you played at home and you're saying to the contestant do this and do that. When you at home are involved in yelling at the screen, then you know you've got an audience."
"Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance."
"Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting-that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art-and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strangers, be it a smile, a pat on the shoulder or a word of praise, is truly a comfort."
"I've put out a lot of little roots these two years," Anne told the moon, "and when I'm pulled up they're going to hurt a great deal. But it's best to go, I think, and, as Marilla says, there's no good reason why I shouldn't. I must get out all my ambitions and dust them."
"Then Diana puts too many murders into [her stories]. She says most of the time she doesn't know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them."
"Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth."
"Mrs. Binnie says we throw out more with a spoon than the men can be bringing in with a shovel...Binnie-like. Our men like the good living. And what if we don't be having too much money, Patsy dear? Sure and we do have lashings of things no money could be buying. There'll be enough squeezed out for Cuddles when the time comes. The Good Man Above will be seeing to that."
"Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering the converse does. The brave who focus and all things good and all things beautiful to give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agent to bring the fullest night to all the world."
"Eucharisteo-thanksgiving-always precedes the miracle."
"Yes," he said. "I am sure. I double-checked everything after you went home yesterday. I even made a few improvements, just in case." The first part of that reassured her. The second part... not so much. "What kind of improvements?" "Oh, nothing, really. Mostly just streamlining. You really did very well; I certainly don't want you to think that I am one of those people who has to be in control all the- Oh, well, I suppose that's actually true- I do have to be in control all the time. But only because I am in charge, of course."
"We're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes."
"People quote proverbs without realizing they're really in awe of the authority of their truth and the power of their expression..."
"Love! What a searing, torturing, intolerably sweet thing it was - this possession of body, soul and mind! With something at its core as fine and remote and purely spiritual as the tiny blue spark in the heart of the unbreakable diamond."
"I am a bed of sparks you breathe upon and kindle."
"He wants to see, he wants to know, only to see and know. I'm aware that it is this mentality, this curiosity, which is responsible for the hydrogen bomb and the imminent demise of civilization and that we would all be better off if we were still at the stone-worshipping stage. Though surely it is not this affable inquisitiveness that should be blamed."
"Freedom of conscience does not mean being uncontrolled - we have to control ourselves and at times submit to others..."
"Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow."
"People bond themselves into families and groups for protection, and strangers...strangers are always at risk."
"It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon - lung-burning, mentholated and pure."
"You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself."
"Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow."
"So by the time the morning came, Odysseus and I were indeed friends, as Odysseus had promised we would be. Or let me put it another way: I myself had developed friendly feelings towards him - more than that, loving and passionate ones - and he behaved as if he reciprocated them. Which is not quite the same thing."
"The accumulation of personal wealth and the extension of commercial transactions have developed a great and lamentable increase in certain classes of crimes, while the improvements in transport have largely facilitated the escape of fugitive criminals."
"The reason Armand Gamache could go there was because it wasn't totally foreign to him. He knew it because he'd seen his own burned terrain, he'd walked off the familiar and comfortable path inside his own head and heart and seen what festered in the dark. And one day Jean Guy Beauvoir would look at his own monsters, and then be able to recognize others. And maybe this was the day and this was the case. He hoped so."
"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."
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