Canadian Author Quotes

Money and love flow past us, like the waves on that beach with that inner tube that drowned at sea; or was lost. And no man came to put the voiceless conch-shell to his lips.

Austin Clarke (novelist)

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

Barry Webster (writer)

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.

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

May Agnes Fleming

There is a difference between the facts of a person and the truth of him.

The ultimate umpire of all things in Life is — Fact.

Agnes Christina Laut

We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist.

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 writers feel struck by the limitations of language.

Margaret Atwood

Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows - dear stench.

The trails of the world be countless, and most of the trails be tried; You tread on the heels of the many, till you come where the ways divide;And one lies safe in the sunlight, and the other is dreary and wan,But you look aslant at the Lone Trail, and the Lone Trail lures you on.

There was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away, put me in prison, but I will know [her] when we are old.

Michael Ondaatje

I do this in my long poems. I have to move between one thing and another and this oscillation is the way I find out what I'm trying to say

I don't want to turn any of this into poetry / but / you're so beautiful / flowers turn their heads to smell you

The white man had come with the Bible in one hand, the bottle in the other.

E. Pauline Johnson

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Inverted heart,
becomes the testicles
of a man.

A simile is like a pair of eyeglasses, one side sees this, one side sees that, the device brings them together.

George McWhirter

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?

The Canadian people are more practical than imaginative. Romantic tales and poetry would meet with less favour in their eyes than a good political article from their newspapers.