Canadian Novelist Quotes

Alice Munro

Lucy Maud Montgomery

A. E. van Vogt

Mavis Gallant

Mazo de la Roche

Gabrielle Roy

Louise Penny

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.

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.

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

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

It's weird when you hear teachers call each other by their first names. It's like they're friends or something.

But it is never over;
nothing ends until we want it to.
Look, in shattered midnights,
On black ice under silver trees,
We are still dancing, dancing.

Gwendolyn MacEwen

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

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

Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but only in contradiction to what we know of nature.

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

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

Betty Jane Wylie

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

You'd have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn't seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, it's deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall.

My heart throbs and aches and, for once, it's not for myself. It's for all of us. It's for everyone who knows what it's like to be helpless, to have to watch on the sidelines, to be paralyzed, literally unable to do anything.

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

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 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

By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept.

Elizabeth Smart (Canadian author)

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

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.