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Quotes by Canadian Authors


"But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo."

"I believe that Canadians have the common sense to see that a better future cannot be built on fragmentation."


"Furthermore, neither of our research groups set out in search of RNA catalysis."

"It makes you realise that people are the same wherever you go."

"I'm looking forward to influencing others in a positive way. My message is you can do anything if you just put your mind to it."

"Have a sense of humor about life - you will need it. And be courteous."


"Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business...because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people."

"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."


"I think a lot of contemplation happens in bathtubs. It does for me. Nothing like a hot bath to ease the tension and think about what's going to happen next."

"As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation."

"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts."

"It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will."

"Claire was struggling through last summer's diary volume when Myrnin popped in through the portal, wearing a big floppy black hat and a kind of crazy/stylish pimp coat that covered him from neck to ankles, black leather gloves, and a black and silver walking stick with a dragon's head on it. And, on his lapel was a button that said, If you can read this, thank a teacher."

"Anne looked at the white young mother with a certain awe that had never entered into her feelings for Diana before. Could this pale woman with the rapture in her eyes be the little black-curled, rosy-cheeked Diana she had played with in vanished schooldays? It gave her a queer desolate feeling that she herself somehow belonged only in those past years and had no business in the present at all."

"There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta."

"If you aren't in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret."

"I grew up below the poverty line; I didn't have as much as other people did. I think it made me stronger as a person, it built my character. Now I have a 4.0 grade point average and I want to go to college, and just become a better person."

"I certainly would have regretted not getting into wrestling. It's been very lucrative for me and I've been fortunate to get into it and make money and not do anything stupid where I invested in something that collapsed."


"And I'm in favor of that because I have a gay son, who's a very successful theater designer."

"To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out while he himself puts them on like a sock over a foot onto the stub of himself-his extra sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye which extrudes, expands, winces and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again. Bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way; this journey into a darkness that is composed of women-a woman-who can see in darkness while he himself strains blindly forward."

"I don't think my sense of humor has changed at all; I was born with this, for better or for worse."


"Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it."

"Repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers."

"The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."

"My upbringing in Canada made me the person I am. I will always be proud to be a Canadian."

"There's been nothing but discipline, discipline, discipline all my life."


"But since day one, we've always been kinda up against it. So at the end, it's not surprising that we were kind of led along for so many months and didn't know what the fate of the show was gonna be. It was... in a weird way, just kind of that was the way it's always been."

"For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do."

"Those early sketches looked too cartoony; I really wanted to do detailed drawings - I was taking anatomy classes - but unfortunately I wasn't able to do it because of the time element."


"My mother used to wheel me about the campus when we lived in that neighborhood and, as she recounted years later, she would tell me that I would go to McGill."


"Regardless of what one's attitude towards prohibition may be, temperance is something against which, at a time of war, no reasonable protest can be made."

"No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly."
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