Canadian Poet Quotes

Margaret Atwood

Michael Ondaatje

Robert Service

E. Pauline Johnson

Pauline Johnson

Charles G. D. Roberts

Susanna Moodie

Inverted heart,
becomes the testicles
of a man.

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

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 have learned little from the years that fly;
But I have wrung the color from the years.

Francis Pollock

It is not easy to free
myth from reality
or rear this fellow up
to lutch, lurch with them
in the tranced dancing of men.

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

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

E. Pauline Johnson

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

George McWhirter

O wild, dark flower of woman, Deep rose of my desire, An Eastern wizard made you Of earth and stars and fire.

Charles G. D. Roberts

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.

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?

Canada Could Have Enjoyed:
English government,
French culture,
and American know-how.
Instead It Ended Up With:
English know-how,
French government,
and American culture.

John Robert Colombo

All writers feel struck by the limitations of language.

Margaret Atwood

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Another hill town;
another dry Cinzano in the sun.

John Malcolm Brinnin

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

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

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

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.