Quotes & Sayings About Canadian Identity

I know what it's like to start something and have it suddenly grow out of control. And you want to get rid of it, because it's hurting you and everyone else around you, but every time you try to do that, it consumes you again. — Jodi Picoult

Men are apt to overvalue the tongues, and to think they have made considerable progress in learning when they have once overcome these; yet in reality there is no internal worth in them, and men may understand a thousand languages without being the wiser. — E.D. Baker

What you don't realize as a kid is that if your parents are always going to be there for you, they aren't going to be somewhere else doing exciting and glamorous things. — Robert Breault

I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around. — Vladimir Nabokov

I have an identity crisis which is not resolved because I'm a dual citizen. My whole family is American, and I was born in India but I was raised in Canada. But all my extended family is American, I've held an American passport and I've spent my whole adult life in between New York and LA. So I feel like an American ... and I also feel like a Canadian! I wish more people were dual citizens and then I wouldn't feel like such a freak. — Emily Haines

When one woman doesn't speak, other women get hurt. — Terry Tempest Williams

In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves. — Douglas Coupland

A house filled with love is never empty. — Saru Singhal

Humanity does not know where to go because no one is waiting for it: not even God. — Antonio Porchia

It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here? — Northrop Frye

Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn't. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn't let her. She didn't believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country. — Dionne Brand

We stay in U2's hotel. They bought a hotel, The Clarence, a nice place and it's in an area where everything's happening, so many fantastic restaurants and bars and the people are so friendly. — Bonnie Tyler

I wish I could give up smoking, but it does taste so delicious. — Caitlin Moran

We build this country ourselves every day and we have to be, in the most positive sense, totally unreal. — J.C. Villamere

Cassie Wright knows, the moment you make yourself available to any man, he starts to take you for granted — Chuck Palahniuk

My kids are young and my life with them is really stimulating and really full and significant. — Jodie Foster

Mission is at the heart of what you do as a team. Goals are merely steps to its achievement. — Patrick Dixon

Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic. (229-230) — Norman Doidge

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources. — Marshall McLuhan

The Canadian Identity, it seems, is truly elusive only at home. Beyond the borders Canadians know exactly who they are, within they see themselves as part of a family, a street, a neighbourhood, a community, a province , a region, and on special occasions like Canada Day and Grey Cup weekend and, of course, during the Winter Olympics, a country called Canada. Beyond the borders, they pine; within the borders, they more often whine — Roy MacGregor

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent. — Northrop Frye