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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature."
"If you dread ending up in the bunker, practice these tricky out-of-the-sand shots until you master them. Think of it as insurance-we all have learned that, once you know you can make that shot easily, you will seldom need to!"
"Trust is the bridge from yesterday to tomorrow, built with planks of thanks."
"You cannot name a Canadian prime minister who has done as many significant things as I did, because there are none."
"I was so angry to realize I'm a Quebecois, with no past, no history, just two cans of maple syrup."
"Oh, sometimes I think it is of no use to make friends. They only go out of your life after a while and leave a hurt that is worse than the emptiness before they came."
"Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony."
"A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal."
"The Legislature of Lower Canada, consisting chiefly of Roman Catholics, could hardly be expected to support a church which they were taught to consider heretical, and in Upper Canada the scanty means at the disposal of the Government, precluded all hope."
"The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution."
"Great dislike to the Bible was shown by those who conversed with me about it, and several have remarked to me, at different times, that if it were not for that book, Catholics would never be led to renounce their own faith."
"Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal."
"Behavioral science is not for sissies."
"There used to be an old thing where every team had a heavy bag in their locker room for people to punch, but again, it was more about conditioning because if you hit a heavy bag for a minute, it feels like your arms are about to fall off."
"In Canada, women's rights are a vital part of our effort to build a society of real equality - not just for some, but for all Canadians. A society in which women no longer encounter discrimination nor are shut out from opportunities open to others."
"The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd."
"A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?"
"Self-manipulation is our medication. Mythology is our drug. The only cure is honesty."
"You always do good ones. We trust you, Mr. Duke," Says Dylan. Foolish lads, thinks Felix: never trust a professional ham."
"The true self is that which is in touch with reality. The false self is the aspects of your personality that are adapted to threats and no longer consciously recognizes either the adaptation or the threat."
"My music isn't anything but me. It has jazz in it, and rock'n'roll, and it has an urgency to it."
"I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?"
"We may not yet know the right way to go, but we should at least stop going in the wrong direction."
"I decided law was the exact opposite of sex; even when it was good, it was lousy."
"Is the writer a prophet or priest - does he show the truth or serve the truth?..."
"Reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact."
"How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering. The converse does."
"God is universal," spluttered the priest.The imam nodded strong approval. "There is only one God.""And with their one god Muslims are always causing troubles and provoking riots. The proof of how bad Islam is, is how uncivilized Muslims are,: pronounced the pandit."Says the slave-driver of the cast system," huffed the imam. "Hindus enslave people and worship dressed-up dolls.""They are golden calf lovers. They kneel before the cows," the priest chimed in."While Christians kneel before a white man! They are flunkies of a foreign god. They are nightmare of all nonwhite people."
"All I had to do was go out and perform. One of the hardest things was doing those back flips, where you had to jump up and land on the top rope. It's precision movement."
"Ever since I started to get recognition I've picked out certain fans and reverse-stalked them."
"I've never been one to sit back and go, 'I'd better do what the audience wants me to do, because I don't want to lose them.'"
"Whenever there is authority, there is a natural inclination to disobedience."
"Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space."
"The first day was memorable for me. I walked into this studio with these giant eyes, slowly met everybody and got to see the story boards and sketches of our characters. I got the see the sets and was just amazed that all this was to be something we all were going to be part of for almost a year."
"If it is a first offense, you ground them and have a talk. The second offense would call for counseling."
"Even the draft dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, most of them... unless they are breaking Canadian laws .. are getting American dollars from Ma and Pa at home to spend here."
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