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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"I think the way to change it is to handle issues individually when it's essential to do so."
"Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms."
"The mind would rather fret about the future or pine over the past - so the mind can cling to its own illusion of control. But the current moment? It cannot be controlled. And what a mind can't control, it tends to discount. Brush past ... over. It's the battle plan of the enemy of the soul - to keep us blind to this current moment, the one we can't control, to keep us blind to Him, the One who controls everything."
"There is a whole school of Canadian academics, media personalities, and politicians whose definition of a Canadian is a North American who fears or dislikes the United States."
"When they tell me one of my old movies is on TV, I don't look at it."
"To be silent. In hopes of not offending, in hopes of being accepted. But what happened to people who never spoke, never raised their voices? Kept everything inside?Gamache knew what happened. Everything they swallowed, every word, thought, feeling rattled around inside, hollowing the person out. And into that chasm they stuffed their words, their rage."
"A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not."
"Just because I don't do bad things doesn't mean I don't have bad thoughts."
"After more than a thousand years,' he continued, 'an enemy finally broke through. Not because of superior firepower. Not because the Manchus were better fighters or strategists. They weren't. The Manchus breached the Great Wall and took Beijing because someone opened a gate. From the inside. As simple as that. A general, a traitor, let them in and an empire fell."
"This is my home, Cape Breton is my home, and I don't know if I really want to leave it as much as I might think and I'm sort of scared to leave it all behind, everything I've lived with, I have so many memories of all the things I've done here and I'm afraid if I leave, I might lose all my memories."
"Eventually he'd let the answering machine take over and had hidden in his studio. Where he's hidden all his life. From the monster. He could feel itin their bedroom now. He could feel its tail swishing by him. Feel its hot, fetid breath.All his life he knew if he was quiet enough, small enough, it wouldnn't see him. If he didn't make a fuss, didn't speak up, it wouldn't hear him, wouldn't hurt him. If he was beyond criticism and hid his cruelty with a smile and good deeds, it wouldn't devour him. By now he realized there was no hiding. It would always be there, and always find him. He was the monster."
"A critic must be knowledgeable in several fields, practices, and mediums. Brushing off art that they personally don't understand, is not a critique."
"Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer."
"There are those who are legitimately corrupt, who cannot admit that legitimacy allows them to corrupt legitimacy, and to legitimately corrupt others."
"When I look out at the audience at some of our shows, I think we are reaching a younger audience... I see lots of people in their 30s and 40s, but I also see a lot of people in their young and middle teens, and that's definitely reassuring."
"Well, the years from 10 to 20, when your body, mind and everything is like changing every five minutes, can be pretty torturing. And most of the interesting characters, I think, are somewhat tortured or torturous. I'm 20 now, so I'm only just an adult."
"Anybody who says they don't like fighting in the NHL have to be out of their minds."
"The reason I dislike talking about the creative process is that I do have a creative process that is a winner and it's a sure thing."
"I have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock."
"The ghastly thing about postal strikes is that after they are over, the service returns to normal."
"There are feet that are swift to mete out defeat to anything different, but in doing so the assailant is already defeated. I say to them that the lack of awareness concerning their premature end is due to their immaturity and ignorance. The awareness defeatists lack, is found in those they hunger to defeat. To them, difference is hostility."
"If they are willing to give women economic freedom in that home, if they are willing to live by the standard they wish women to live by, then homes will be preserves."
"People strive hardest to save face, when the beauty they value is solely extrinsic."
"You've got to be able to look at the mirror and smile at yourself. If you can't do that, you've got work to do. You have to learn to get along with yourself, to like yourself, to be proud of yourself. You've got to learn to celebrate yourself. You need to be able to love yourself before you can ever appreciate anyone else who does. You're worth it. Put the work in to have the best relationship with yourself that's possible."
"Homes, Gamache knew, were a self portrait. A person's choice of color, furnishing, pictures, every touch revealed the individual. God, or the devil, was in the details. And so was the human. Was it dirty, messy, obsessively clean? Were the decorations chosen to impress, or were they a hodgepodge of personal history? Was the space cluttered or clear? He felt a thrill every time he entered a home during an investigation."
"I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact."
"I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me."
"I think the moral majority and religious right have been shrinking and having not quite as loud a voice in America, and all of a sudden people are coming to their own realizations going, 'Joe down the street is gay and he's a great guy.'"
"Gamache nodded. It was what made his job so fascinating, and so difficult. How the same person could be both kind and cruel, compassionate and wretched. Unraveling a murder was more about getting to know the people than the evidence. People who were contrary and contradictory, and who often didn't even know themselves."
"The value of routine, trusting your swing."
"Indifference may not wreck a man's life at any one turn, but it will destroy him with a kind of dry-rot in the long run."
"Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady, but a newspaper can always print a retraction."
"A dream isn't a wish - it's an altered state of consciousness ..."
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