top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Canadian Authors
"All in all, it was a never-to-be-forgotten summer - one of those summers which come seldom into any life, but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going - one of those summers which, in a fortunate combination of delightful weather, delightful friends and delightful doing, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world."
"Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it's a negative importance, it's the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don't count. I feel singled out, but also bereft."
"We are haunted houses of history. Nobody that we meet ever dies while we are alive."
"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."
"OVERREACTING" sounds like "OVARYACTING" Coincidence? I think NOT!!"
"When we stop fearing failure, we start being artists."
"I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room."
"You humans, always eating. I'll make you soup. You can eat it while you keep working." Myrnin set aside his book and walked into the back of the lab."Don't use the same beaker you used for poisons!" Claire yelled after him. He waved a pale hand. "I mean it!"
"In my dreams of this city I am always lost."
"Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond."
"The idea that the State is capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great skepticism - which foretells a coming change.As soon as skepticism is applied to the State, the State falls, since it fails at everything except increasing its power, and so can only survive on propaganda, which relies on unquestioning faith."
"If people think I am gay, yeah, hey that doesn't bother me. Not at all. What would people think? To me I am such a heterosexual guy. It doesn't even, I don't even think about it."
"If the United States leads a multinational force into Iraq without United Nations backing, Canada should fight beside its neighbour. We've gone from being a middle power to a muddle power on this one."
"The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call "self-help."
"After life has broken you open, perhaps you may create art."
"The internet is 95 percent porn and spam."
"What makes a writer a prophet is his ability to speak truth..."
"I shouldn't have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge."
"Knowledge is responsibility, which is why people resist knowledge."
"I love you. You're the only one." She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them."
"Facts do not fall in the face of discomfort."
"I know you want me to feel some sympathy for them, but that's not who I am. I care only about those I know, and even then, not all that deeply. Strangers get nothing from me."
"She can outstare anyone, and I am almost as good. We're impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen. We wear long wool coats with tie belts, the collars turned up to look like those of movie stars, and rubber boots with the tops folded down and men's work socks inside. In our pockets are stuffed the kerchiefs our mothers make us wear but that we take off as soon as we're out of their sight. We scorn head coverings. Our mouths are tough, crayon-red, shiny as nails. We think we are friends."
"Look, do you see that poem?' she said suddenly, pointing."
"It is claimed, but with what truth we cannot say, that there is a well-defined propaganda among the aliens of colour to bring about the degeneration of the white race."
"You all right?" he said again.I didn't love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn't belong here. But he existed, he deserved to be alive. I was wishing I could tell him how to change so he could get there, the place where I was."Yes," I said. I touched him on the arm with my hand. My hand touched his arm. Hand touched arm. Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole."
"He watched over word and thought and deed as jealously as if her clear eyes were to pass judgement on it... She held over him the unconscious influence that every girl, whose ideals are high and pure, wields over her friends; an influence that would endure as long as she was faithful to those ideals and which she would certainly lose if she were ever false to them."
"He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read."
"I've marked our sacred place not with stones - I've put it my art to keep it safe..."
"Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?"
"I'd like to THANK the genius who saw a bunch of cherries and thought....HEY!! If I dry out a bunch of those berry seeds, call them "BEANS, smash them and add hot water, it will be AWESOME!!!!"
"If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you?"
"When the awareness of what is achievable brushes your life, your journey has begun."
"There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud."
"Awareness makes us emotionally brilliant."
"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."
"Your life. Your choices. People will give you endless opinions on how you should live your life and who you should be. Don't allow them. Don't listen. This is your life."
bottom of page