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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"Where do the words gowhen we have said them?"
"I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage."
"The [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning, learning is caused by complexity in the mind."
"A woman who has a sense of humor possesses no refuge from the merciless truth about herself. She cannot think herself misunderstood. She cannot revel in self-pity. She cannot comfortably damn any one who differs from her."
"Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia."
"We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time."
"I have been reading three books Dean lent me this week. One was like a rose garden--very pleasant, but just a little too sweet. And one was like a pine wood on a mountain--full of balsam and tang--I loved it, and yet it filled me with a sort of despair. It was written so beautifully--I can never write like that, I feel sure. And one--it was just like a pig-sty. Dean gave me that one by mistake."
"Yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood..."
"A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to understand. Just because we cannot capture its workings in verbal propositions does not mean it should be scrapped and reinvented according to the fashionable theories of the day. Such ham-fisted tinkering will only lead to unintended consequences, culminating in violent chaos."
"I had no name for that particular hue of orange, other than unfortunate."
"Many criminologists believe that the source of the state's pacifying effect isn't just its brute coercive power but the trust it commands among the populace. After all, no state can post an informant in every pub and farmhouse to monitor breaches of the law, and those that try are totalitarian dictatorships that rule by fear, not civilized societies where people coexist through self-control and empathy. A Leviathan can civilize a society only when the citizens feel that its laws, law enforcement, and other social arrangements are legitimate, so that they don't fall back on their worst impulses as soon as Leviathan's back is turned."
"What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be."
"How sadly things had changed since she had sat there the night after coming home! Then she had been full of hope and joy and the future had looked rosy with promise. Anne felt as if she had lived years since then, but before she went to bed there was a smile on her lips and peace in her heart. She had looked her duty courageously in the face and found it a friend--as duty ever is when we meet it frankly."
"When poverty declines, the need for government declines, which is why expecting government to solve poverty is like expecting a tobacco company to mount an aggressive anti-smoking campaign."
"That's the essence of me - I don't think, I feel - at best, I think-feel..."
"The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens " tax livestock " labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters."
"How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next-if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions-you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to."
"I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does."
"Evil fascinates and repels us - it's a terrible beauty that enthralls us the more we stare into it..."
"You okay?""Fine.""Your heart's beating really fast.""Gee, thanks. That's very comforting that you can hear it."He smiled, and it was the old Michael, the one she'd first met before all the vamp stuff."Yeah, I know it is. Sorry. Just stay behind me if there's trouble.""You sound like Shane.""Well, he did say he'd kill me if I got you hurt. I'm just looking after my own neck.""Liar."
"As you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong, you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day."
"Even evolutionary explanations of the traditional division of labor by sex do not imply that it is unchangeable, "natural in the sense of good, or something that should be forced on individual women or men who don't want it."
"I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them."
"The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth."
"We were happy, and still are, to be able to do what we love."
"I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatter-proof. It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge."
"I retreat into my fictional world where everything makes sense - but even there I can't even control what people do..."
"You can have a dark heart and be a writer, but you can't have a black one.."
"There is so much in the world for us if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it ourselves- so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful for."
"You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else - to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know - because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint - Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?"
"We shall all respect the principles of each other and do nothing that would be regarded as an act of oppression to any portion of the people."
"More than ever at that instant did she long for speech - speech that would conceal and protect where dangerous silence might betray."
"My pen shall heal, not hurt."
"That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us."
"When you ARE imagining you might as well imagine something worth while."
"Only a seer or a lover would know that I'm making a jewelry of words for you -drawn from your essence -to flash and burn with your fire -so you can bedazzle with your own light ..."
"I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance."
"It's easy to express romantic love - harder to manage daily love - to forgive failings close to feelings - to divide self from soul..."
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