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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"You're not ethnic enough. You're not fat enough. You're not thin enough. You're not blond enough. You're not dark enough. You're not young enough. You're not old enough."
"Why is it,' she asked, snuggling closer, 'that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?"
"Ya know what I do almost every day? I wash. Personal hygiene is part of the package with me."
"It's been easier to convince people to hand over half their income, their children to war, and their freedoms in perpetuity, than to engage them in seriously considering how roads might function in the absence of taxation."
"You're not exactly up for the Humanitarian of the Year award, so save your altruism for someone who can't see through you like cellophane."
"You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times... and safely home again."
"I can get away with saying a lot of ideas that are young and naive. I'm liberated."
"Our settlement of land is without regard to the best use of land."
"But Madonna has a small amount of talent when it comes to movies."
"Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination."
"You have to find something there that relates to the characters and reality on some level."
"Amelie said, "I won't be your servant in Morganville. Nor should you be mine. Equals. She offered her hand to him, and he looked down at it, clearly taken aback. But he took it. "Now defend what is ours, my partner. He grinned, grinned! and whirled to meet Myrnin in midleap as Myrnin attacked."
"In her experience, groups of friends like that just didn't open up to include underage, undersized geeks like her. They hadn't sounded mean, they just sounded - self-confident. Something she wasn't."
"I'm here in the mountains, in the foothills of the Catskills."
"Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved."
"Mandy smiled cheerfully at an overweight kid in a gold sweater and pink skirt who was chasing her little brother around along the boardwalk. When she was that age, on sunny days she'd be out on the boardwalk with Jud and Wendy, buying rainbow sorbet from the ice cream shop and placing paper boats into the harbour. She felt like a ghost, drifting past the shell of her own childhood."
"Claire found herself staring at his feet, which were in bunny slippers. Myrnin looked down. "What?" he asked. "They're quite comfortable." He lifted on to look at it, and the ears wobbled in the air. "Of course they are," she said. Just when she thought Myrnin was getting his mental act together, he'd do something like that. Or maybe he was just messing with her. He liked to do that, and his dark eyes were fixed on her now, assessing just how weirded-out she was. Which, on the grade scale of zero to Myrnin, wasn't much."
"It takes a huge amount of culture to normalize "crazy", and of course that's its main focus."
"Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense."
"In this drawing we just let our imagination run wild. We visualized Superman toys, games, and a radio show - that was before TV - and Superman movies. We even visualized Superman billboards. And it's all come true."
"There once was a kindly farmer who found a viper freezing on the ground in the snow. Please help me, the poor creature said, for I am too cold to live. The farmer took the viper and put it inside of his shirt, and the viper began to warm itself and come alive again. But upon coming alive, it bit the farmer most wretchedly, and as the farmer died, he asked the viper, but why? Why when I was so trusting of you?Because I am a viper, the snake replied. And one cannot expect kindness from evil."
"Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture."
"When I started off, I didn't only ride to fame on my looks though many people I know think otherwise."
"But the greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out. You want the listener to find the song on their own. If you give too much away, it takes away from the imagination."
"Do we elect a man because of what he stands for, because of where he stands on the issues, because how he makes the nation feel?"
"The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions."
"I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis."
"Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult."
"I think Alison Krauss and her band are the best today. The same goes for Rick Skaggs and his band."
"I was so angry to realize I'm a Quebecois, with no past, no history, just two cans of maple syrup."
"I really think that effective acting has to do literally with the movement of molecules."
"I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?"
"Forgiveness is the intentional act or process of pardoning or offering absolution unto another."
"It's good to have mysteries. It reminds us that there's more to the world than just making do and having a bit of fun."
"Instead of being on teams at school, I was preparing for auditions."
"Don't be self-conscious - other people are completely unaware of you and more concerned with how they appear ..."
"The child psychologist's clinic: where imaginary friends go to die, where dreams go to burn, where creativity goes to drown."
"Christianity does not remove you from the world and its problems; it makes you fit to live in it, triumphantly and usefully."
"Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom."
"People learn when they are ready to learn. Are you ready?"
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