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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"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?"
"Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters."
"The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health."
"The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top."
"Nobody really wants to be your friend when they discover that you work with dead people."
"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..."
"By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being."
"Appeasers will always try to get the least dangerous person to bend to the most dangerous person. This is one of the main problems in dysfunctional relationships. The more mature and rational you are the more you are victimized because, they are aware that you're not going to be as aggressive, destructive, or possibly as abusive and so you are the one who has to bend. You're the one who has to change and this constant rapping of rational people's souls around the prickly irrationalities of other people are what appeasers are constantly doing."
"Emotion,' she told him, 'is not a reliable guide for our words and actions.'There you are wrong,' he said. 'Deep, true emotion is our surest guide. We make our greatest mistake when we allow our heads to rules ours hearts.'Emotion is our human weakness.,' she said, 'reason our strength.'And love,' he said, 'is our destiny."
"Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money."
"I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne."
"You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be."
"Any human companionship, even the dearest and most perfect, would have been alien to her then. She was sufficient unto herself, needing not love nor comradeship nor any human emotion to round out her felicity. Such moments come rarely in any life, but when they do come they are inexpressibly wonderful - as if the finite were for a second infinity - as if humanity were for a space uplifted into divinity - as if all ugliness had vanished, leaving only flawless beauty."
"And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world."
"I never really grew up until I had kids."
"Living in the past is like choosing to cling to a chronic illness."
"You ask me why I compare you to stars - it's simple - that's where your goddess has fled..."
"You are constantly being trained to be heroic only in the service of your masters - only in slaughter and sacrifice and subjugation. But there is no heroism in serving your masters. Real heroism is questioning why you have masters at all.All these stories, all these fantasies, all these superpowers - are designed to steal heroism from you, to make it impossible, fantastical, remote, and unachievable - and make you useful to your masters (as a hit man, if needed). What is the opposite of this?The opposite of fantasy is philosophy. The opposite of mythology is integrity. And integrity is truth in action."
"It's not the win that matters so much as recognizing and respecting its value."
"What is the purpose of reason, Richard Parker? Is it no more than to shine at practicalities - the getting of food, clothing and shelter? Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net of there's so little fish to catch?"
"Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive."
"Set aside your repertoire of objections and own 100 percent of your focus."
"Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure."
"Experiences were what you got when you couldn't get what you wanted."
"I'm pro-forwards. Do I want the Seventies to come back? No. The haircuts were terrible. Everyone stank. The food was awful."
"I am sure that in Canada the people appreciate this principle, and the general intelligence which prevails over that country is such that I am sure there is no danger of a reactionary policy ever finding a response in the hearts of any considerable number of our people."
"He hung up on her. She'd just been hung up on by a disembodied brain in a jar. Fantastic."
"We are haunted houses of history. Nobody that we meet ever dies while we are alive."
"Anybody who tries to change society without first examining the family, is trying to push a shadow without moving a statue."
"She dug into one of the boxes, finding clay angels she'd made in art class when she was seven years old. She found plastic swans on strings and red crystal cardinals. She found a blue-and-white rocking horse covered in glitter. She found a porcelain Santa Claus. She found that she couldn't figure out where the hell time had gone."
"At seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ..."
"Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another."
"Jealous?""Maybe.""No reason. I like my ladies with a pulse."
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