Best 494 quotes in «canada quotes» category

They think I’m not entirely ‘grounded in reality’, they say. They want me to go to some live-in nerdy activity ranch thing for troubled Canadian youth, that one out in Ontario where you come back programmed like some robot, dressed in a tye-dyed shirt and eating tuna sandwiches,” Mandy explained, a horrified look on her face. “You’re eighteen, not twelve! Would they really send you to some rat’s nest like that?” Wendy questioned in mock horror. “Aw hell no, if you get sent there, they’ll make you hold hands and sing songs about caring! And they’ll force you to recycle everything in blue canisters, and to discuss your emotions in front of groups of bratty little dopes!” “Dear god, they’ll have geeky youth wiener roasts at night, and no locks on the doors!” Mandy added, eyes wide. “…It’ll be the day pigs fly, my parents have the camp brochure on the fridge but they’ll never go through with sending me there. They always forget.

This is my home, Cape Breton is my home, and I don’t know if I really want to leave it as much as I might think and I’m sort of scared to leave it all behind, everything I’ve lived with, I have so many memories of all the things I’ve done here and I’m afraid if I leave, I might lose all my memories…

This points to a central tension in our very idea and practice of democracy – it is not a simple appeal to the rule of the majority. It is also about respecting that the power of the people is limited by what’s fair to minorities, what’s reasonable, and by what’s legal and constitutional.

To be honest, it's a real relief to go to Canada where I can be among my relatives. Just the kind of break I need. Strange enough, when I'm there, I can't wait to get back to Guyana. There's something that's always calling me back, something in the blood, I guess." Father Martin to Carl Dias in Racing With The Rain.

To fit the individual to live and to function in the institutional life of his day.

Vive Le Québec Libre.

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.

Try as you might, you'll never be able to please an environmentalist. You can stop using coal to heat your house, you can stop throwing out bottles and cans, you can have every factory in Canada shut down and you can buy only organic gluten-free non-GMO food, you can give up your favorite station wagon for a weird electric hybrid, you can stop developing film and buy a never-ending cycle of digital cameras, you can give up your job at a refinery or mill, and they'll still get after you for not enjoying yourself while doing so.

Tommy looked blank. "What's a flashlight?" "You don't have flashlights?" Jessup said. "Jeeze! A cylinder, like, with batteries inside it, and a light bulb behind glass at one end--" Tommy's blue eyes glinted dangerously. "We have a thing in Scotland that's a cylinder too. Very thin, made of wood, with graphite in the center. We call it a pencil." Jessup hooted. "You think we don't have pencils?" "You think we don't have flashlights?" Tommy snapped. "That's just American dialect. In the English language they're called torches." Emily said mildly, "Actually we're Canadians.

Well known how violent it is in the States. Worst you'll get here,' said Jack, 'is a good punch-up and maybe your car pushed over the cliff.

We, gays, can get married in Canada. We let heterosexuals too, but that was a huge thing, we had to have a referendum and a vote, it’s crazy! But then we were like, if they want to get married.. that’s cool. That’s gonna destroy their relationships, but.. Heterosexuals deserve the same rights as homosexuals.

Well we're waiting here in Allentown, For the Pennsylvania we never found, For the promises our teachers gave, If we worked hard, If we behaved... So the graduations hang on the wall, But they never really helped us at all, No they never taught us what was real, Iron and coke, And chromium steel, And we're waiting here in Allentown... But they've taken all the coal from the ground, And the union people crawled away...

Well, we're originally from Glace Bay." Grandma Elsie's eyes glittered. She was looking at one of her own, a lost Cape Bretoner in need of help and offering a new story. "Tell me all about it, dear.

Well, I don't know the whole situation in detail, but my guess is that it's in Quebec's self-interest to stay part of Canada―because the alternative is to become part of the United States. Quebec's not going to be able to remain independent, so it can either become part of the United States or stay part of Canada. And given that choice, I think it's better off staying part of Canada. I mean, if Quebec became independent from Canada, it wouldn't necessarily be called part of the United States―like it wouldn't get colored the same as the United States on the map―but it would be so integrated into the American economy that it would effectively be a colony. And I don't think that's in the interest of the people of Quebec, I think they're better off staying part of Canada.

Wendy’s house, unlike many in Cape Breton, had three floors, along with a basement and attic. Aside from Wendy’s bedroom, there was a laundry room. The dirty water in the sink would rush from the washer hose, bubbling up, threatening to overflow, but it never did. Next-door was a motel with a neon sign that read in turquoise and pink, “We have the best rates in town!”, but the ‘E’ in ‘rates’ kept flickering on and off day and night so that every few seconds it would switch to, “We have the best rats in town!

We would drive to Canada, where it would probably be legal for us to get married- it was Canada where they let people do whatever they wanted because it was too cold to bother stopping them.

We’re losing society to apathy, to digital technology, the people who care about nobody else but themselves. They share every little detail of their stupid lives online as if the world even gives a damn… digital technology is getting smarter and society is getting dumber,” Mandy whispered in a voice filled with disbelief. “Society is… it’s slipping away.

We were poor back then. Not living in a cardboard carton poor, not “we might have to eat the dog” poor, but still poor. Poor like, no insurance poor, and going to McDonald's was a really big excitement poor, wearing socks for gloves in the winter poor, and collecting nickels and dimes from the washing machine because she never got allowance, that kind of poor… poor enough to be nostalgic about poverty. So, when my mom and dad took me here for my tenth birthday, it was a really big deal. They’d saved up for two months to take me to the photography store and they bought me a Kodak Instamatic film camera… I really miss those days, because we were still a real family back then… this mall doesn’t even have a film photography store anymore, just a cell phone and digital camera store, it’s depressing…

What are you doing?” Alecto asked in surprise, stepping back. Laughing brightly, she dragged him towards the greenhouse, the shattered glass reflecting rainbows as brilliant as a million Kodak flashcubes, glittering as they were cascaded through the breeze. “See, don’t be afraid of the glass, it can’t hurt us,” Mandy laughed, spectacularly eccentric, her eyes reflecting the fallen glass. “I wasn’t afraid of the glass, but this isn’t a very secluded place that you just decided to vandalize,” Alecto cautioned, smiling despite his words. Before Mandy could reply, she heard loud whispering in the air, behind the trees… it sounded like a group of people, all whispering in unison… “Somebody’s out there,” she exclaimed nervously. “Yeah, you’re right,” Alecto replied. Suddenly a sharp new vibrancy seemed to fill his eyes and he smiled coldly, taking the tree branch from Mandy and rapidly smashing in all of Mrs. Matthias’ stained glass house windows with it. Blue, green, yellow, red, turquoise, purple and an array of other colors showered through the sky noisily, sounding like wind chimes and crashing waves. “They’ll go away,” he told her, glancing up at the sky. “…Alecto, do you like me?” Mandy questioned, holding out her arms like a lopsided scarecrow as the glass fell through her dark red hair. “Yeah, sure,” he answered. “Will you be my friend, then? A real friend, not just another person who feels sorry for me?” Mandy asked. “…Alright, Mandy Valems,” Alecto agreed.

What a land. What power these rivers were already yielding, far beyond her sight. Even a map of this country--lines arranged in an arbitrary way on a long rectangular piece of paper-- stirs the imagination beyond imagination, she thought, looking at the map, as other lines differently arranged in relation to each other have not the power to stir. Each name on the map says "We reached this point, by broken trail and mountains and water; and when we reached it, thus and thus we named it.

What notion did you have of Canada when you came?" Mistry smile delicately, the face behind the trimmed beard and glasses like that of a student. "I thought it would complete me.

What kind of hellish punishment does Lev have planned if he needs the females’ crazy magic moon water? Nothing Talon has ever heard of but the gryphon is a recluse and stories about him keep children from sneaking out alone; a terribly convoluted mixture of the rogue army attack on his eyrie, death, and the name Lev, one of the few survivors mean enough to live through it.

Who, in particular, is responsible for this decimation of our history? - The provincial ministries of education for preaching and practising parochial regionalism and for gutting their curricula of content. - The ministry of bureaucrats who have pressed the "whole child" approach and anti-élitist education. - The ethnic communities that have been conned by Canada's multiculturalism policy into demanding an offence-free education for all Canadian children, so that the idea that Canada has a past and a culture has been all but lost. - The boards of education that have responded to pressures for political correctness by denuding their curricula of serious knowledge and offering only trendy pap. - The media that has looked only for scandal and for a new approach to the past, so that fact becomes half truth and feeds only cynicism. - The university professors who have waged internecine wars to such an extent that they have virtually destroyed history, and especially Canadian history, as a serious discipline. - The university presses and the agencies that subsidize professors for publishing unreadable books on miniscule subjects. - The federal governments that have been afraid to reach over provincial governments and the school boards to give Canadians what they want and need: a sense that they live in a nation with a glorious past and a great future.

When the north wind blew across the tar ponds, voices were carried away.

When things come to the worst, they generally mend.

Working simultaneously, though seemingly without a conscience, was Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose base was a laboratory in Canada's McGill University, in Montreal. Since his death in 1967, the history of his work for both himself and the CIA has become known. He was interested in 'terminal' experiments and regularly received relatively small stipends (never more than $20,000) from the American CIA order to conduct his work. He explored electroshock in ways that offered such high risk of permanent brain damage that other researchers would not try them. He immersed subjects in sensory deprivation tanks for weeks at a time, though often claiming that they were immersed for only a matter of hours. He seemed to fancy himself a pure scientist, a man who would do anything to learn the outcome. The fact that some people died as a result of his research, while others went insane and still others, including the wife of a member of Canada's Parliament, had psychological problems for many years afterwards, was not a concern to the doctor or those who employed him. What mattered was that by the time Cheryl and Lynn Hersha were placed in the programme, the intelligence community had learned how to use electroshock techniques to control the mind. And so, like her sister, Lynn was strapped to a chair and wired for electric shock. The experience was different for Lynn, though the sexual component remained present to lesser degree...

With Pollution, emotion is irrelevant, it is not their nature,” Mearth sighed, making a face as if she were talking to an ignorant small child. “I didn’t create them, humans created the Pollution. Cheryl Nobel, Alecto Steele, Albert Sanders, Olivia Campbell, all my pretty little Representations, there aren’t many of them left these days but they’re still very dangerous! They’re here to tell society all about its mistakes! You don’t understand the world of Representations.

Why’d you want to kill yourself? Didn’t you feel anything, or didn’t it hurt you?” Mandy questioned, looking puzzled. “Yes, I suppose it did, … it was strange, it was sharp, that’s all I can think of to describe it… and cold, but not cold like ice, more like… I don’t know, like something much worse, something horrible… and it seemed like the ground was falling upwards, becoming the sky… for a moment it made me consider that it was just a dream, that I was on some sort of drug, and then I remember being overjoyed to see the sky was still above me, then just really sad, really tired… and then I don’t remember much else about it,” Alecto told her, glaring straight ahead at the sky with narrowed eyes. “I don’t mind, I’m not supposed to mind, anyway. Mearth already told me that eventually I would want to be dead, that it was inevitable… still, I sometimes wish that I could have done something good for other people in my life, it might have made up for all the bad stuff I’ve done.

Wisdom of the Ages: "Canada" still lobbying to get drinking and driving included as an Olympic sport.

Without a doubt, it [Canada] is the land God gave to Cain.

With thousands of years of history frozen in time, it's no wonder that many southerners like me romanticize the north as a place where we can freeze our former selves, thaw, and then bloom anew. Here it’s just you, the land, and your thoughts, and you can't leave until you've wrestled with yourself and emerged a survivor. But then again, the light is much more intense up here and everything looks different because of it. The sun hasn’t set in a couple of months, and you can see things much more clearly when it is light all of the time.

Writing about Aboriginal themes means joining the dots from the colonial policies of the past to the problems faced by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit today. It means acknowledging the wrongs and the pain.

Yeah, you’re right about having entire rooms full of film and photos… in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage… I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides… I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that’s happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,” Alecto responded. “People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines… The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I’ve been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.

You’re innocent until proven guilty,” Mandy exclaimed, unable to hide her gleeful smile. She missed the way people used to have normal conversations, used to be more caring for each other than themselves, back in the Seventies and Eighties. These days, she realized, neighbors kept to themselves, their kids kept to themselves, nobody talked to each other anymore. They went to work, went shopping and shut themselves up at home in front of glowing computer screens and cellphones… but maybe the nostalgic, better times in her life would stay buried, maybe the world would never be what it was. In the 21st century music was bad, movies were bad, society was failing and there were very few intelligent people left who missed the way things used to be… maybe though, Mandy could change things. Thinking back to the old home movies in her basement, she recalled what Alecto had told her. “We wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed.” The 1960’s and 1970’s were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was the popular film type, when music had lyrics that made you think, when movies had powerful meanings instead of bad comedy and when people would just walk to a friend’s house for the afternoon instead of texting in bed all day. She missed soda fountains and department stores and non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags, she wished cellphones, bad pop music and LED lights didn’t exist… she hated how everything had a diagnosis or pill now, how people who didn’t fit in with modern, lazy society were just prescribed medications without a second thought… she hated how old, reliable cars were replaced with cheap hybrid vehicles… she hated how everything could be done online, so that people could just ignore each other… the world was becoming much more convenient, but at the same time, less human, and her teenage life was considered nostalgic history now. Hanging her head low, avoiding the slightly confused stare of the cab driver through the rear view mirror, she started crying uncontrollably, her tears soaking the collar of her coat as the sun blared through the windows in a warm light.

You hear stories about people who've committed bad crimes. Suddenly they decide to confess it all, turn themselves in to the authorities, get everything off their conscience-the burden, the harm, the shame, the self-hatred. They make a clean breast of things before going off to jail. As if guilt was the worst thing in the world to them. I'm willing to say now that guilt has less to do with it than you might think. Rather, the intolerable problem is of everything suddenly being so confused: the clear path back to the past being cluttered and unfollowable; how the person once felt being now completely changed from how he feels today. And time itself: how the hours of the day and night advance so oddly-first fast, then hardly passing at all. Then the future becoming as confused and impenetrable as the past itself. What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed-caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present. Who wouldn't want to stop that-if he could? Make the present give way to almost any future at all. Who wouldn't admit everything just to gain release from the terrible present? I would. Only a saint wouldn't.

You’re not an artist, you’re not a scientist, you’re not an intellectual. All that’s left to you is politics.

You know, Dorothy, you can’t let people bring you down so easily or you’ll have your nose in the dirt for the rest of your life. From what I make of it, for every person with a good thought, there are about fifty who’d try to spoil it. We have to guard our good ideas, our happy thoughts, and fight for them. Because if we let those others snuff them out, well, we didn’t after all deserve them.

You're actually each other's wingman. You never leave your partner vulnerable." - Graham Warner, husband of fun-loving seven-time cancer survivor Dionne Warner

A Canadian is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe.

After being in captivity for so long, I can't begin to describe how wonderful it feels to be home in Canada.

Actually, in this instance we do have probably a better tracking system than was the instance in Canada. Because this is a dairy cow, they're all individually tagged.

After all, we fought the Yanks in 1812 and kicked them the hell out of our country - but not with blanks.

A lot of films in Canada are subsidized by the government, and compared to a studio, the government really stays out of your face creatively.

All politics are local, whether in Kabul or in Canada.

Americans assume Canada to be bestowed as a right and accept this bounty, as they do air, without thought or appreciation.

A lot of Scots have settled in Canada over the years and it's a very easy place for Scots - they understand us, we understand them.

Although most Americans don't know it, the U.S. gets more oil from Canada than it does from the entire Middle East.

An optimist in Canada is someone who think things could be worse

Anybody who sides with Canada internationally in a debate between the U.S. and Canada, say, Belgium, is somebody whose opinion we shouldn't care about in the first place.

Another turn in my life happened when I took on the Canada Council.