Canadian Fiction Quotes

I mutter and mutter and no one to listen. I speak my words in Japanese and my daughter will not hear them. The words that come from our ears, our mouths, they collide in the space between us.
"Obachan, please! I wish you would stop that. Is it too much to ask for some peace and quiet? You do this on purpose, don't you? Don't you! I just want some peace. Just stop! Please, just stop."
"Gomennasai. Waruine, Obachan wa. Solly. Solly."
Ha! Keiko, there is method in my madness. I could stand on my head and quote Shakespeare until I had a nosebleed, but to no avail, no one hears my language. So I sit and say the words and will, until the wind or I shall die. Someone, something must stand against this wind and I will. I am. ~ Hiromi Goto

B'gwus is famous because of his wide range of homes. In some places, he's called Bigfoot. In other places, he's Yeti, or the Abominable Snowman, or Sasquatch. To most people, he is the equivalent of the Loch Ness monster, something silly to bring the tourist in. His image is even used to sell beer, and he is portrayed as a laid-back kind of guy, lounging on mountaintops in patio chairs, cracking open a frosty one. ~ Eden Robinson

Where once his grandparents put up crucifixes and images of the benediction on their walls, he and Reine-Marie put up books on theirs. History books. Reference books. Biographies. Fiction, nonfiction. Stories lined the walls and both insulated them from the outside world and connected them to it. ~ Louise Penny

We just move on, don't we, with traitors still amongst us? But there was one thought that wouldn't go away. If I loved him, I would forgive him. ~ Graham Spaid

Every answer can be followed by another question. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction. ~ Adrian Tomine

Will always wanted to live his own life, not have others live it for him. Looking back at it now, it was foolish to think so ~ Rehan Khan

The Tanzanian told her that all fiction was therapy, some sort of therapy, no matter what anybody said. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They were more than partners, more than brothers; they were very nearly the same person. ~ A.C. Williams

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.) ~ C.S. Lewis

I'm really aware that in fiction, women are pretty much equal. There's a lot of very successful women novelists. Not so much [for women writers working] in film. ~ Emma Donoghue

And it was inconceivable that the God of War would not be able to be the victor in a little skirmish like that, when all the cards were already stacked in his favour.
What could Jupiter do if he took her by force & deflowered her? In Roman Mythology, Mars was the only God who had ever raped a Vestal Virgin, an event that led to the birth of Romulus & Remus & the founding of Rome.[MMT] ~ Nicholas Chong

The urge to impose a single classification on SF ignores the generic hybridity of many novels: incorporation of the Gothic in The Island of Dr Moreau, of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Forbidden Planet, and so on. The rise of film coincides with the emergence of science fiction. The relation between SF fiction and film has included an ongoing fascination with spectacle and extraordinary special effects like those pioneered in Georges Melies's A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904). ~ David Seed

I'm not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way. ~ Robert Sheckley

Two people, one city, different times; connected by a memoir. Can love exist in a city destined for decades of misery? ~ Ahmad Ardalan

People who are readers of fiction aren't particularly interested in comic books. ~ Harvey Pekar

I was on a panel with light skinned Blacks and a famous gay science fiction writer, who were complaining about how Blacks are against gays and light skinned Blacks and how intolerant Blacks are of different groups. My position was that Blacks were among the most humanistic, tolerant groups in the country and that across the street from my house in Oakland was one inhabited by White gays. ~ Ishmael Reed

It feels like I was made to fit here, in the space beneath his heart. ~ Caroline Greyling

As a science fiction writer who began as a fan, I do not use my fiction as a disguised way to criticize the reality of the present. I feel that the greatest appeal of science fiction is the creation of numerous imaginary worlds outside of reality. I've always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.

The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big bang. The three-billion-year history of life's evolution from self-reproducing molecules to civilization contains twists and romances that cannot be matched by any myth or epic. There is also the poetic vision of space and time in relativity, the weird subatomic world of quantum mechanics … these wondrous stories of science all possess an irresistible attraction. Through the medium of science fiction, I seek only to create my own worlds using the power of imagination, and to make known the poetry of Nature in those worlds, to tell the romantic legends that have unfolded between Man and Universe. ~ Liu Cixin

She was a predator - a creature of the night who rejoiced in the thrill of the hunt. ~ Alan Kinross

Love is not measured by acts or years, but by truth between two people. ~ Evan Meekins

Here grew willows and alders, their trunks twisted like giants' sinews. Around them bark lichen bloomed blue-white in the darkness. It felt like a good place, where there was old magic. ~ Duncan Harper

Connor had become a doctor just two days ago - along with all of his friends. They were hand-selected at just three years old to undergo intensive medical training as part of a controversial experiment, called Kid Docs. In the past few years, the Kid Docs program had produced some of the best doctors in the entire country, if not the world. They had some of the lowest complication rates and the highest success rates, and they had developed innovative new procedures that saved lives that were previously unsalvageable. Connor hoped that he would be among the best doctors in the world someday. But right now, he was focused on only a single thing: saving this one man's life. ~ J.W. Lynne

The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up. ~ Douglas Adams

She had captured his heart and he didn't ever want it back. ~ Christine Feehan

That's what scares me the most, Paul. That I'll just pass through life and all the people I know will just disappear, without a trace, without me ever telling them how much they mean to me, no matter how small the time spent was or how great the friendship was. That they'll be gone and they'll forget me and I'll end up with nothing."
I saw in my head Charley laughing, Charley sticking his head out the window and screaming, Charley playing a video game so intensely he was a foot from the screen. Moments flashed before my eyes in a quick, unrelenting sequence.
I shook my head. "I know. Believe me, I know. ~ J.C. Joranco

I've played drug dealers, all my life. I've made a career of killing people and playing all kinds of killers. The violence and drugs is portrayed in exaggeration. This is fiction. That is how I looked at it. And, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Just open a newspaper. ~ Benicio Del Toro

Prior to the Reform Act, the Supreme Court had ruled that the guilt or innocence of the property's owner was irrelevant to the property's guilt - a ruling based on the archaic legal fiction that a piece of property could be "guilty" of a crime. The act remedied this insanity to some extent; it provides an "innocent owner" defense to those whose property has been seized. ~ Michelle Alexander

In my classes, we read great fiction obsessively, and then attempt to see how a writer managed to affect us. We try to understand which elements - diction, syntax, point of view and so forth - made us feel that way. After we spend several weeks reading this way, wondering how the author made us shiver like that, we try our own hand. I ask students to begin with 'green lines,' to isolate writing so good it makes one writer envious of another. Which parts do they wish they had written themselves? Students start to understand how their own writing works, where it ripples with energy… What they really want is to have some kind of firsthand, visceral relationship with a book - to see what it's like to take a work apart and put it back together - using great stories as structural models, just the way the kids I grew up with in Detroit fell in love with cars by spending weekends trying to make derelict Ford Mustangs run again. When the engine finally starts, when you figure out how to make it fire, it's an incredibly powerful learning experience. ~ Dean Bakopoulos

I love Canada, and I dated someone who was Canadian a few years ago, and she brought me into a deeper understanding of the greatness of the culture. ~ Eileen Myles

To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found to be swarming with numberless allusions to the popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happeend to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romances of the hippopotami are affected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Philippe to his mother "do stop chasing after a carriage that has a runaway mare. ~ E.L.R. Jones Formerly, Now Ellie Keys

(I'm not online.) I don't have a fax. I don't go in for any of that stuff. The typewriter is as far as I went. ~ Walter Kaylin

Well ironically my last three roles have all been a mother. One was a Canadian film where the baby was taken away because she is a drug addict, in Irish Jam I play a mother to a four year old. I think in the future I'll be able to handle the role with a lot more depth. ~ Anna Friel

[Science fiction is] the attempt to deal rationally with alternate possibilities in a manner which will be entertaining. ~ Lester Del Rey

To write your dreams of fantasy, is to create fantasy in another's dreams ~ Rob Shepherd

The science fiction writer cuts out her heart. It is a thousand hearts. It is all the hearts she will ever have. It is her only child's dead heart. It is the heart of herself when she is old and nothing she ever wrote can be revised again. It is a heart that says with its wet beating mouth: Time is the same thing as light. Both arrive long after they began, bearing sad messages. How lovely you are. I love you.
The science fiction writer steals her heart from herself to bring it into the light. She escapes her old heart through a smoke hole and becomes a self-referencing system of imperfect, but elegant, memory. She sews up her heart into her own leg and gives birth to it twenty years later on the long highway to Ohio. The heat of herself dividing echoes forward and back, and she accretes, bursts, and begins again the long process of her own super-compression until her heart is an egg containing everything. She eats of her heart and knows she is naked. She throws her heart into the abyss and it falls a long way, winking like a red star. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

So I'm alone. I have no one. Is that what you're telling me? - Junco, Range (to be published April 2013) ~ J.A. Huss

At times it's like sadness has planted itself on her face, refusing to leave, an overwhelming sadness, and sometimes I see despair there, too. ~ Melina Marchetta

I see sarcastic and obscene visions of angels and demons
flirting with the souls of men creating horror and deities
in surreal worlds, and writing plays for us to perform;
while I am being dragged into the darkness. I want to
know who is doing all this… I fell back into that lethargic
dream of bottomless pits and deserts hanging from the
skies. ~ E.C. Lemus

False assurances were certainly more harmful than none at all. ~ Chris Womersley

Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that's appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider. ~ Christopher Rice