top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Canadian Authors
"How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word."
"Perfectionists are not all negative, miserable, unhappy and over controlling individuals."
"Not much in the world ends up being the same as it started out, unless of course it had a very short life cycle."
"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 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 tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not."
"People don't have dominion over Nature. it's gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now the same thing. The future and whatever happens to you after you die - it's all melted together. Death isn't the escape hatch the way it used to be."
"The fault lies with us, and only us. It's not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and it's definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately it's us and our choices...but the most powerful spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well."
"As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'"
"Self-affirm-build yourself up with honest and genuine praise."
"Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well."
"For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control. I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go."
"Too many are sorry where they should be assertive, and nearly moved to aggressive radical action, where they should be apologizing to themselves first, and then the world at large."
"She writes like an angel, it says of Laura on the back of one of the editions of The Blind Assassin. An American edition, as I recall, with gold scrollwork on the cover: they set a lot of store by angels in those parts. In point of fact angels don't write much. They record sins and the names of the dammed and the saved, or they appear as disembodied hands and scribble warnings on walls. Or they deliver messages, few of which are good news: God be with you is not an unmixed blessing."
"Claire. Wake up. She blinked and realized that her head was on Shane's shoulder, and Michael was nowhere to be seen. Her first thought was, Oh my God, am I drooling? Her second was that she hadn't realized she was so close to him, snuggled in. Her third was that although Michael's part of the couch was empty, Shane hadn't moved away. And he was watching her with warm, friendly eyes. Oh. Oh, wow, that was nice."
"How promising today's generation is. They can whip out their cellular phones like sheep, instantly take a million digital photos of their cat and then just delete them. But I'd like to see these kids try to artfully use a traditional film camera or make a super 8 home movie. Traditional film takes integrity, nostalgia, effort, patience and imagination - things that the 21st century has very little of. Everything these days, even a superior medium like film photography with an extensively vivid history and an iconic meaning, is becoming disposable in this age."
"Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from."
"My rage is derived from eyes so sharp they see through the idiocy being passed off as sophistication. Under the cloak of universal themes and terms such as freedom, change, and acceptance, madness ensues, being readily welcomed by those whose mind's eye questions nothing."
"You don't have to be invisible to disappear."
"Anne reveled in the world of color about her."Oh, Marilla," she exclaimed one Saturday morning, coming dancing in with her arms full of gorgeous boughs, "I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn't it? Look at these maple branches. Don't they give you a thrill--several thrills?"
"Realizing and truly accepting that we are constantly evolving, that everything and everyone around us is also constantly evolving helps us to understand things. We have no way of predicting the future. What is right/wrong for us now, may not be right/wrong for us tomorrow because we and everything is constantly changing. We are free to make decisions with the knowledge that there is no exact correctness by which we can make a decision. It's ok if the decision doesn't work out, in fact, that will happen. It's also ok to change our mind. There is no shame in changing our mind. What was right for us yesterday may just not work for us anymore."
"I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define."
"Thinking there had to be a better way was a brilliant stroke of serendipity!"
"If there ever comes a time that you forget where you came from, you've gone too far."
"Alecto Sydney Steele, an entity of few words whom society managed to overlook as it rapidly dove into the 21st century. Everything about him, his interests, his friends, his own life, was constantly in danger of becoming an anachronism. And caught up in that mess was Mearth, not exactly evil in nature but just misunderstood. A very long time ago Alecto's life had been all incandescent sparkles and Kodachrome, but that was before the environmental movement changed Mearth from a perfectly nice and kind guardian, to a deranged and malevolent monster."
"I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That's science fiction; it isn't going to happen."
"Happy? Most of the time? Happiness is always a fleeting thing,' he said, 'It never rests upon anyone as a permanent state, though many of us persist in believing in the foolish idea that if this would just happen or that we would be happy for the rest of our lives. I know moments of happiness just as most other people do. Perhaps I have learned to find it in ways that would pass some people by. I feel the summer heat here at this moment and see the trees and the water and hear that invisible gull overhead. I feel the novelty of having company when I usually come here alone. And this moment brings me happiness."
"It's ok to think the way you think, just as long as you respect that it's not the only way."
"If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it."
"Unhealthy relationships are most commonly lacking in the most essential of ingredient: healthy communication."
"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."
"Sorry is the day, and full of lament, when the young have to guard themselves from being food for the old.I am moved to bewilderment, when I glance my eyes upon a society that kills its young, and then pretends to mourn their modus operandi.Worse still, are those who have no compassion for the legacy and lack of positive inheritance being left to us, the future.We have to save our parents and their friends. They raised us,but do not trust us. They are too tired to enact change. The source of progress, and the wealth of the future is, us."
"Hope for the best,brace yourself for the worst and no matter what you're faced with, make a plan to KEEP GOING!"
"If you have a really good ideas, one thing you dont need is a fucking gun. An iPad is a kind of a cool thing. They don't need to threaten you with fines to get you to buy one do they? The moment the government says they're gonna force you to do something, you know its a bad idea. If someone invites you on a date with chloroform, an old sofa, and a windowless van, it's not a date.So, the fact that ObamaCare, welfare state, military industrial complex, public schools - you name it. The fact that it has to be imposed at gunpoint is a clue that it's shit. Recognize that when there is a gun to your face, there is not a very advantageous human being on the other end."
"Pearls are congealed oyster spit."
"Our hearts break, and take us out of relationships that are too painful for us."
"Anne walked home very slowly in the moonlight. The evening had changed something for her. Life held a different meaning, a deeper purpose. On the surface it would go on just the same; but the deeps had been stirred. It must not be the same with her as with poor butterfly Ruby. When she came to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the shrinking terror of something wholly different--something for which accustomed thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted her. The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must begin here on earth. That goodnight in the garden was for all time. Anne never saw Ruby in life again."
"We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes."
bottom of page