Canadian Author Quotes

Margaret Atwood

Alice Munro

Lucy Maud Montgomery

A. E. van Vogt

Michael Ondaatje

Yann Martel

Robert Service

Journeys start from where we are. Everything starts from where we are. Where we are is where we're supposed to be.

The language of her grief is silence. She has learned it well, its idioms, its nuances. Over the years, silence within her small body has grown large and powerful.

Where did feelings go when they disappeared? Did they leave a chemical trace somewhere in our minds, so that if we could look inside ourselves we would see via the patterns of neurons some of the important things that had happened to us in our lifetimes?

And if my heart isn't in my mouth it's because it knows its place.

Phyllis Gotlieb

Never have I met a person doing terrible things who would meet my own eyes peacefully. To gaze into another person's face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own.

August is laughing across the sky
laughing, while paddle, canoe and I
Drift, drift
Where hills uplift
either side of the current.. swift

Pauline Johnson

Life is full of opportunities to feel exactly the way
you want to feel.

Danielle LaPorte

It's never too late to fix things with people you love, Massie. Kendra said. That's true. William agreed.

It matters not how spiritual a church may profess to be, if souls are not saved, something is radically wrong, and the professed spirituality is simply a false
experience, a delusion of the devil. People who are
satisfied to meet together simply to have a good time
among themselves are far away from God. Real
spirituality always has an outcome.

Oswald J. Smith

Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.

Heather O'Neill

Boredom, yes, as in those moments when the eyes stare without itinerary—when the brain's hard drive revolves at low rpm, uncoupled from regimen, responsibility, the whole Logistical Life that becomes one's life in the middle years, what Hinduism calls the Householder Phase, to do to do to do to do to do. But now alpha waves are lapping at the shore of the mind as you depart the secretarial for the sacramental realm.

Steven Heighton

I'm always diplomatic when heavily outnumbered by armed strangers.

I tell you, guilt dwells nowhere but in the eyes of the accuser. This men know even as they deny it, which is why they so often make murder their absolution. The truth of crime lies not with the victim but with the witness.

R. Scott Bakker

But I never cleaned thoroughly enough, my reorganization proved to be haphazard, the disgraces came unfailingly to light, and it was clear how we failed, how disastrously we fell short of that ideal of order and cleanliness, household decency which I as much as anybody else believed in.

Love manifests itself in our bodies as instinctive craving, in our souls as devotion, and in our minds as pride.

Folks think a lifetime is a thing stretched out over years. It ain't. It can happen quick as a match in a dark room.

How deeply do any of us know our own selves? Ask yourself. We hold a picture of how we wish to be and hope it goes forever unchallenged. Passing through life never pursuing aspects of our natures with which we'd rather not reckon. Dying strangers to ourselves.

Spring had come. Despite the many wet and gusty days which April had thrust in rude challenge upon reluctant May, in the glory of the triumphant sun which flooded the concave blue of heaven and the myriad shaded green of earth, the whole world knew to-day, the whole world proclaimed that spring had come. The yearly miracle had been performed.

Picture a place called the Karma Kafe and it'll save me the bother of describing it. There was nothing in it you wouldn't expect, from the Buddha flowerpots to the wallpaper decorated with symbols that probably said, "If you bought this just because it looked pretty, may Buddha piss in your coffee, you culturally ignorant moron.

Kelley Armstrong

Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.

Alan Bradley (writer)

Apertures, passages from one world to another. Man's escape hatches.

One is reluctantly forced to admit that many nurses are not in any true sense of the word educators. This is a lamentable fact, and the responsibility for it must be put on the schools that have attempted to train them, but have failed to make them realize how numerous and diversified their opportunities are.

All that we were has led us to where we are, but tells us little of where we're going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off.

The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it—well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn't be placed at my feet.
The private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose.

Robert Charles Wilson

I've always thought the prettiest smiles are the ones that show the most teeth.