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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"I do not write by any set time schedule. I realize there are many writers who follow a daily regime where they arise at 6:00 a.m., do some sort of exercise, eat breakfast and then sit down and produce words for a three to four hour period."
"I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular "ism," but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence."
"Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building."
"Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain."
"We didn't see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?"
"If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins."
"Conformity to the present is invisibility to the future."
"I am sure that no man can derive more pleasure from money or power than I do from seeing a pair of basketball goals in some out of the way place."
"One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end."
"Sometimes being a MOM is like a good ol' country song! You lose your sleep, you lose your hair, you lose your patience, you lose your energy, you lose your memory AND you lose your SANITY! But you DO IT all for LOVE!"
"So I got to thinking that perhaps that's what money is: a crystallization-or, rather, a homogenization-of time and free will into those things we call dollars and pounds and yen and euros. Money multiplies your time. It also expands your agency and broadens the number of things you can do accordingly. Big-time lottery winners haven't won ten million dollars-they've won ten thousand person-years of time to do pretty much anything they want anywhere on Earth. Windfalls are like the crystal meth version of time and free will."
"There is a passion for perfection which you will rarely see fully developed; but you may note this fact, that in successful lives it is never wholly lacking."
"You became lost in the maze of me - forgive me Love, for keeping you close..."
"Maybe a holiday miracle will change Mearth's awful behavior, Mandy suggested with optimism."The only holiday miracle around here is that Mearth hasn't murdered us both yet, said Alecto, lighting another cigarette, his hands shaking erratically. He looked exhausted and terrified, his gray eyes soulless."Do you know what Mearth likes, Alecto? Mandy questioned."Vegetables, she likes celery a lot, and lettuce, Alecto responded in a quiet monotone. "I don't know what else she likes. I've never asked her."Well, she has to like something, doesn't everyone?"Not her, Mandy Valems."
"Language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset..."
"One longs and longs to be grown up, doesn't one?,' she said, 'I dreamed of being eighteen and having a Season and meeting handsome gentlemen even apart from Dominic and falling in love with them and marrying him and living happily ever after. But life is not nearly as that simple when one finally does grow up."
"Wasted strokes, like missed deadlines, are preventable and costly."
"Let every man shovel out his own snow, and the whole city will be passable,' said Gamache. Seeing Beauvoir's puzzled expression he added, 'Emerson.''Lake and Palmer?''Ralph and Waldo."
"Christianity is a religion in a rush."
"It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible."
"Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus."
"I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out."
"I need to be a vampire," she said. "and I want one of them to make it happen. Michael will do fine. I don't care who turns me. The important thing is that if I change, I'll be a princess."I was wrong. She was really crazy."
"The door of Reverend Verringer's impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it."
"In many Asian households, to not go on to higher education, that's like a big no-no. I know my parents' discouragement was for my own protection, and I'm really close to them now, but they didn't understand that there is value in this. That's because they didn't know."
"I want to lead the Progressive Conservative Party, a party that will promote true conservative values and principles. I can tell you right now, I am not the merger candidate. I am not interested in institutional marriages with other parties."
"What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people."
"The most important thing about skating is that it teaches you to do the things you should do before you do the things you want to do."
"I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing."
"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."
"Shoes and clothing damage our ability to survive naked in the wilderness."
"Actually, after the release of the Bond film, the producers came back to me to offer me another one, but I didn't have any juice left for an immediate encore."
"If the preservation of the home means the enslavement of women, economically or morally, then we had better break it."
"I feel as if something has been torn suddenly out of my life and left a terrible hole. I feel as if I couldn't be I - as if I must have changed into somebody else and couldn't get used to it. It gives me a horrible lonely, dazed, helpless feeling. It's good to see you again - it seems as if you were a sort of anchor for my drifting soul."
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