Canadian Author Quotes

Empty words show an empty mind, and silence speaks most eloquently of all.

They fear others—that is why they sought positions of power. Their greatest dream is to have a King who dances when they move the threads: and for Massenet, to marry his child to the heir of Entonne, and sit his grandson upon the throne. The ordinary desires of those who rise to such positions. In their appetites, they are not men of great originality. Though they will do enormous harm in spite of that.

So, you see, my heart is held forever by this place," she said. "I cannot leave.

Susanna Kearsley

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

It is not simply what one remembers, but why. There are sites of amputation where the past is severed from the body of the present. Remembering only encourages the growth of phantom limbs. And it is not simply what one remembers, or why, but what to do with what one remembers, which of the scattered pieces to carry forward, what to protect and preserve, what to leave behind.

But I feel vanity is a part of art and the non-vain are really non-artistic.

Barry Webster (writer)

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.

The edge of the world is always the next step when you're blind.

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.

Most Americans don't understand Canadian political parties. Neither do most Canadians

Poetry, I'm returning to it, never leaves me. It's my genre completely. In poetry I contemplate myself exuberantly. It's my unique strength. Force of gravity, electric and magnetic energy; in my own way, to make a synthesis.

Nicole Brossard

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

Phyllis Gotlieb

I felt the unordinary romance of / women who love women for the first time.

May Sarton said, "the deeper you go, the more universal you become." It's a reminder to me that those things I try to convince myself I don't need to admit are usually those things I need the most to say. Speaking the truth, in its most poignant details, is liberating and gives those around us the freedom to be real.

Sabrina Ward Harrison

Songs, stories are beyond value; they are the memory and wisdom of a people, the particular individual rivers of the sea of life which constitutes us all.

Fate does not invite ugly boring people to save the world; and if you do try to save the world (without being beautiful, strong, clever, or wise), you will soon die pointlessly and how much adventure is there in that?

James Alan Gardner

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?

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

When Christian theology becomes traditionalism and men fail to hold and use it as they do a living language, it becomes an obstacle, not a help to religious conviction. To the greatest of the early Fathers and the great scholastics theology was a language which, like all language, had a grammar and a vocabulary from the past, but which they used to express all the knowledge and experience of their own time as well.

Longing for something that you once had is a mistake because the pictures in your mind are never the same as whatever it is you are longing for.

Ah me son, we don't be takin' nothin' from the sea. We has to sneak up on what we wants and wiggle it away

Dear God, surely you aren't the chef Sam was talking about?" "No," he said with a laugh, and gestured behind him with a thumb. "Cale here is." "Kale?" Alex echoed blankly, her eyes sliding to the still half-closed door. She didn't see any evidence of a second man. Frowning, she set the phone back in its receiver and leaned to the side, trying to see out into the kitchen as she muttered, "Kale is a vegetable.

America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers.