Canadian Author Quotes

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.

If the facts don't fit your theory, just find some new facts.

By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept.

Elizabeth Smart (Canadian author)

There are deep lines on each side of his mouth and I know they are the scars from the thin blade of life.

Deborah Joy Corey

Do they hate the idea of her, because she's different from them, and that in this difference there might be some sort of inferiority or superiority that is hers or theirs, that in the end threatens the potential happiness of everyone?

Steven Galloway

There's a kind of virgin one only becomes with difficulty.

The medatative approach acknowledges that one moment will inevitably lead on to the next. We accept immortality instead of fighting it off.

Is that all? The mountain in labor has brought forth a mouse.

May Agnes Fleming

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

Listening is one of the lesser-known skills that mistresses offer.

Betty Jane Wylie

Happiness is simple. Everything we do to find it is complicated.

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.

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

A church is an interesting place once you get the parson and the people out of it. Real music can get in then, and a real God! Nothing flibertigibbet about religion then.

Mazo de la Roche

And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I've drunk in a lifetime, I'd never be able to see the shore.

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.

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

And all about him was the wind now, a pervasive sighing trough great emptiness, as though the prairie itself was breathing in long gusting breaths, unhampered by the buildings of town, warm and living against his face and in his hair.

If I don't do what feels right to me, what I need and want to do, then am I really living?

Cheryl Rainfield

Rafe turned up looking like the glass of fashion and the mold of form.

Hulbert Footner

How a mother comes to love her child, her caring at all for this thing that's made her heavy, lopsided and slow, this thing that made her wish she were dead... that's the miracle.

A woman will not understand what true dependency is until she is cradling her own infant in her arms; nor will she likely achieve the self-confidence she craves until she has withstood, and transcended, the weight of responsibility a family places upon her — a weight that makes all the paperwork and assignments of her in-basket seem feather-light.

Danielle Crittenden

Whom the gods do not intend to destroy, they first make mad with poetry.

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

Barry Webster (writer)

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