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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"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!"
"You're too old not to have had, how shall I say, certain experiences. You've had bad internet dates. You've had people be creeps to you. You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world, I feel like I am going mad. Madness is actually quite rare in individuals. It's groups of people who go mad. Countries, cults ... religions."
"The BIG push means being able to develop and sustain momentum toward your goal; it is the process of actively replacing excuses with winning habits, the ultimate excuses blockers. Moreover, it is being willing to go to the wall for what you want or believe in, to push beyond your previous mental and physical limits, no matter what it takes."
"I believe, he said gently, 'we all have a perfect right to make ourselves unhappy if that is what we freely choose. But I am not sure we have the right to allow our own unhappiness to cause someone else's. The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together."
"What are the messages that you are entertaining?"
"Domestic abusers and the abused need to develop healthy support systems..."
"Then there's the twoof us. This wordis far too short for us, it has onlyfour letters, too sparseto fill those deep barevacuums between the starsthat press on us with their deafness.It's not love we don't wishto fall into, but that fear.This word is not enough but it willhave to do. It's a singlevowel in this metallicsilence, a mouth that saysO again and again in wonderand pain, a breath, a fingergrip on a cliffside. You canhold on or let go."
"Keep an open mind and know that you can always learn more."
"A plain is what a mountain aims to be: the closest you can come to being in outer space while yet having your feet on this planet."
"The eastern sky above the firs was flushed faintly pink from the reflection of the west, and Anne was wondering dreamily if the spirit of color looked like that."
"But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down."
"Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down."
"As he was bringing his hands up her sides, his fingers just barely brushed the outer curve of her breasts, and she gasped into his mouth.Shane immediately sat her upright, and moved to the other end of the couch. His face was flushed; his eyes were bright and no longer looked even a little bit tired. "No,' he said, and held out his hand like a traffic cop when she tried to scoot closer. "Red flag. If you make that sound again, we are in trouble. Or I am, anyway."
"Living in the past is a conscious or an unconscious choice made through a connection to the past."
"I suppose all this sounds very crazy - all these terrible emotions always do sound foolish when we put them into our inadequate words. They are not meant to be spoken - only felt and endured."
"TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public."
"I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does."
"What messes us up a lot in this life is setting our expectations way too high and then being ashamed when we fail. What is worse is when we allow other people to make us feel ashamed for failing. What is worse than that is hiding and lying about our failure. It's ok to fail, especially when it's a significant life change and you gotta stand up for that right in this life."
"We compose our life in stories we tell ourselves."
"Corruption ultimately guilts the corrupt, and it hardens the innocent who suffer as a result of it. It isn't the young who corrupt the old, rather it's the inverse.The aim of the old should be to ensure that the young grow up incorruptible."
"All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next."
"Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgement."
"If you spend time with crazy and dangerous people, remember " their personalities are socially transmitted diseases; like water poured into a container, most of us eventually turn into " or remain " whoever we surround ourselves with. We can choose our tribe, but we cannot change that our tribe is our destiny."
"From within the mind we look out and envision, contemplating and interpreting each new challenge and the action we will take."
"They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began."
"She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can't have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate something that is never spoken? She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had attended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone-to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny."
"Most people, if philosophy touches them, they shatter, they atomize, they turn to dust. It is win/lose between philosophy and delusion, and most people are almost entirely composed of delusion. They're only allowed as much reality as serves the masters. But they're not allowed any reality which disturbs their masters..."
"He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it."
"I've got America's best writer for $300 a week."
"I've forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home."
"After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbles. The bones dry sticks, easily broken."
"The scarlet thread,the red clay from which we were made, runs in tiny streams through all our veins, reminding us of where we began..."
"Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business."
"Don't waste any of your precious time or energy on negativity. There's no time for that nonsense."
"Once she wasn't supposed to like it. To have her in a position she didn't like, that was power. Even if she liked it she had to pretend she didn't. Then she was supposed to like it. To make her do something she didn't like and then make her like it, that was greater power. The greatest power of all is when she doesn't really like it but she's supposed to like it, so she has to pretend."
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