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Quotes by Canadian Authors

"We were a very small circle of writers. Everybody brought to the table their own life experience."


"For our immediate family and relatives, Canada was a land of opportunity."

"As to the first, I do not know that I have done very much myself to promote fraternity between nations but I do know that there can be no more important purpose for any man's activity or interests."


"I sort of feel like music saved my life when I was young. This is the one thing that I knew I was good at."

"Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today."

"I do miss Saturday Night Live, that's for sure. There's nothing like it. I just hosted, and I felt I'd only been away for a week."

"As I've said, in 2007, we're free to go and we'll just have to do what's best for the business."

"We, in our Province, are beginning to realize and appreciate that our slowness in keeping up with our North American neighbours may well have been a blessing in disguise."

"There are some things in the past that, that just aren't meant to be viewed."

"When you drive by Radio City and you see your name up there and it's only 'your' name. I just went 'ooh'. I thought this is really like looking at another person."

"You can't be chasing 15 rabbits. Otherwise, the public mind cannot follow you."

"I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I'm just trying to create a good one for myself."

"Rome was great in arms, in government, in law."

"I see you from afar-fragile and shy as a star gleaming through a cloudy rift."

"I make soup and I back bread and I know my supreme need is joy in God and I know I can't experience deep joy in God until I deep trust in God. I shine sinks and polish through to the realization that trusting God is my most urgent need. If I deep trusted God in all the facets of my life, wouldn't that deep heal my anxiety, my self-condemnation, my soul holes? The fear is suffocating, terrorizing, and I want the remedy, and it is trust. Trust is everything. If fear keeps our lives small, does a life that receives all of God in this moment grow large too?"

"There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still."


"I liked Nicole Kidman because she is so fashionable she can do less is more. It was very, very simple, but it was so chic. Some people thought she looked washed out, I didn't at all."

"Adults are tempted to produce and perform Christmas for their kids and their families, and they arrive at Christmas Day weary and disillusioned."


"There's nothing lonelier than empty relationships. At least when you're alone you can be yourself, but when you're in empty relationships you can't even be yourself.You can be real alone, or you can be a ghost with false friends.Pulse proximity is not intimacy, and it's worse than no friends at all."

"Hate destroys EVERYTHING except itself. Everything. Including you."

"These are very subtle things, of course, and I don't expect everyone to pick them up consciously, but I think that there is something there that you must be able to feel, there is an energy at work that I must trust my audience will be able to pick up at some level."

"Nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look-my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn."

"Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression."

"When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?"

"Ya know what I do almost every day? I wash. Personal hygiene is part of the package with me."

"Sometimes life gives you a little punch in the stomach... You just gotta catch your breath and keep going."

"The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers."


"I desperately want a dog, but I've been told I travel too much, and I'm not allowed to have a dog."

"I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science."

"The one thing that I have done really well in my life is be a father."

"When you're a young actor you like to go for characters with a bit of flair, so in many films I ended up playing the weirdos. I can assure you I'm not a psycho or a criminal or a bully."
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