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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"But it seems she'd wanted children after all, because when she was told she'd been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her."
"We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down."
"Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?"
"When you're a writer, you become deeper and more uniquely distinct, the more you go inside yourself..."
"Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit."
"All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard."
"If one student is unable to get online, it cripples that student's team and puts the whole course in jeopardy."
"I never fancied cats much till I found the First Mate," he remarked, to the accompaniment of the Mate's tremendous purrs. "I saved his life, and when you've saved a creature's life you're bound to love it. It's next thing to giving life."
"My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes."
"Some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ..."
"I see you as series of gestures, a palette of colors -all these tiny tiles pixelate, and then coalesce... into the idea of you..."
"When I read that the flash came, and I took a sheet of paper. . .and I wrote on it: I, Emily Byrd Starr, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the Alpine Path and write my name on the scroll of fame."
"The woods are never solitary--they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity."
"You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself."
"No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this."
"My life will be what I make it,' he told her. 'That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make."
"They don't know who I am; what they do know, is that I'm not nothing, and that I'm not noone."
"When I left Queen's my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don't know what lies around the bend, but I'm going to believe that the best does."
"Don't build roadblocks out of assumptions."
"Excuses fall silent behind self-control, focus, and direction."
"She strong-armed the swinging door and walked through. Straight into an acid flashback.Clara's first reaction was to laugh. She stood stunned for a moment then started to laugh. And laugh. And laugh until she thought she'd piddle. Peter was soon infected and began laughing. And Gamache, who up until this moment had only seen a travesty, smiled, then chuckled, then laughed and within moments was laughing so hard he had to wipe away tears.'Holy horrible taste, Batman,' said Clara to Peter who doubled over, laughing some more.'Solid, man, solid,' he gasped and managed to raise a peace sign before having to put both hands on his knees to support his heaving body."
"I lost my illusions in a black rain of bitterness - now what do you see in my eyes? How can you still love me? How can I be tender? ..."
"Look at an infantryman's eyes and you can tell how much war he has seen."
"The ultimate umpire of all things in life is Fact."
"Girls did that then, knocked themselves out to support some man's notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot on the side. Once in a while they even smoked some of that, though not often, because it made Constance cough. It was all very romantic."
"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication."
"Nice hair.' Olivier turned to Clara, hoping to break the tension.'Thank you.' Clara ran her hands through it, making it stand on end as though she'd just had a scare.'You're right.' Olivier turned to Myrna. 'She looks like a frightened doughboy from the trenches of Vimy. Not many people could carry off that look. Very bold, very new millennium. I salute you.'Clara narrowed her eyes and glared at Myrna whose smile went from ear to ear."
"A child's attachment process begins within the first year of life..."
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