Quotes from Canada

“Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“Most things don't stay the way they are very long.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they’re substantial, that they’re not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“What I know is, you have a better chance in life-of surviving it-if you tolerate loss well;manage not to be a cynic through it all;...
to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good,even if the good is not simple to find. We try, as my sister said. We try.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“Loneliness, I've read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it's promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“It was as if they'd discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They caught a glimpse of the person they fell in love with, and who sustained life. For some, that vision must never dim - as is true of me. But it was odd that our parents should catch their glimpse, and have frustration, anxiety and worry pass away like clouds dispersing after a storm, refind their best selves, but for that glimpse to happen just before landing our family in ruin.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“It was as if I'd already left some time before and was just catching up with myself.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became—like a long proof in mathematics in which the first calculation is wrong, following which all other calculations move you further away from how things were when they made sense.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“Probably many people’s vision of “thinking something through” is of this nature: you do precisely what you
want to do—if you can.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“Against these forces -- an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving -- time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance, and should.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“Most things dopn't stay the way they are very long.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn't been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with other or for them. And assimilating possibly wasn't so hard and risky and didn't need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I've already said, becoming someone else -- but someone who was not stalled but moving, which was the nature of things in the world. I could like it or hate it, but the world would change around me no matter how I felt.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“It's hard to go through life without killing someone.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below you. You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away and all is lost.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“...good counsel: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me -- and, with these things to make a life.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“It’s odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that’s lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they’re otherwise neither.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“...to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

“don’t see what this has to do with us.” I say back, “Does everything have to be about you? Can you not project yourself outside yourself? Can you not take on another’s life for your own benefit?”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada

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Popular quotes

“It won't make you feel any better, he told me, it might even make things worse for a while. But you mustn't let the sadness die inside you. You have to give it some life.”
― Kevin Brooks, quote from Lucas

“You want me to attend your hanging?”
His tone must have contained some of the incredulity he felt, for the captain gave him an impatient look.
“I’d have sent an engraved invitation, had I time,” he said.”
― Diana Gabaldon, quote from Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade

“নিন্দা করতে গেলে বাইরে থেকে করা যায়, কিন্তু বিচার করতে গেলে ভিতরে প্রবেশ করতে হয়।”
― Rabindranath Tagore, quote from Gora

“It's never going to stop,’ Malenfant whispered. ‘It will consume the Solar System, the stars—’
This isn't some local phenomenon, Malenfant. This is a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. It will never stop. It will sweep on, growing at light speed, a runaway feedback fueled by the collapse of the vacuum itself. The Galaxy will be gone in a hundred thousand years, Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, in a couple of million years. It will take time, but eventually—
‘The future has gone,’ Malenfant said. ‘My God. That’s what this means, isn’t it? The downstream can’t happen now. All of it is gone. The colonization of the Galaxy; the settlement of the universe; the long, patient fight against entropy...’ That immense future had been cut off to die, like a tree chopped through at the root. ‘Why, Michael? Why have the children done this? Burned the house down, destroyed the future—’
Because it was the wrong future. Michael looked around the sky. He pointed to the lumpy, spreading edge of the unreality bubble.
There. Can you see that? It's already starting...
‘What is?’
The budding... The growth of the true vacuum region is not even. There will be pockets of the false vacuum—remnants of our universe—isolated by the spreading true vacuum. The fragments of false vacuum will collapse. Like—
‘Like black holes.’ And in that instant, Malenfant understood. ‘That’s what this is for. This is just a better way of making black holes, and budding off new universes. Better than stars, even.’
Much better. The black holes created as the vacuum decay proceeds will overwhelm by many orders of magnitude the mere billion billion that our universe might have created through its stars and galaxy cores.
‘And the long, slow evolution of the universes, the branching tree of cosmoses?...’
We have changed everything, Malenfant. Mind has assumed responsibility for the evolution of the cosmos. There will be many daughter universes—universes too many to count, universes exotic beyond our imagining—and many, many of them will harbor life and mind.
‘But we were the first.’
Now he understood. This was the purpose. Not the long survival of humankind into a dismal future of decay and shadows, the final retreat into the lossless substrate, where nothing ever changed or grew. The purpose of humankind—the first intelligence of all—had been to reshape the universe in order to bud others and create a storm of mind. We got it wrong, he thought. By striving for a meaningless eternity, humans denied true infinity. But we reached back, back in time, back to the far upstream, and spoke to our last children—the maligned Blues—and we put it right. This is what it meant to be alone in the universe, to be the first. We had all of infinite time and space in our hands. We had ultimate responsibility. And we discharged it. We were parents of the universe, not its children.”
― Stephen Baxter, quote from Manifold: Time

“He looked like he wanted to say something but his jaw tensed and
instead he let his hand travel from my elbow to my hand, the strong pulse from his fingers like a balm to my injured soul. I raised our entwined hands
and placed them over the steady thumping of his heart a twin of the rhythm in my own chest. I pressed my head to his chest letting the steady pace
of his heart and his citrusy, musky scent envelop me, lull me into a place of security. A place safe enough that I didn’t have to pretend I was okay. I
failed to sniff back the tears that began to leak from me.”
― Lani Woodland, quote from Intrinsical

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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