Toronto Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Toronto. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Life is All About How you Handle Plan B Plan A is always my first choice. You know, the one where Everything works out to be Happily ever-after. But more often than not, I find myself dealing with The upside-down, inside-out version -- Where nothing goes as it should. It's at this point that the real Test of my character comes in.. Do I sink, or do I swim? Do I wallow in self pity and play the victim, Or simply shift gears And make the best of the situation? The choice is all mine... Life is all about how you handle Plan B.
Suzy Toronto (The Sacred Sisterhood Of Wonderful Wacky Women)
Toronto's already ass-deep in cockroaches and conservatives; what's one more lower life-form?
Tanya Huff (Blood Bank (Vicki Nelson #6))
Before we left town, Antonio pulled into a strip mall and went in to get subs and salads, leaving Clay and me half naked and bleeding in the car, and Cain unconscious in the trunk. No wonder I was anxious to get back to Toronto. Spend too much time around these guys and you become a little too nonchalent about blood-soaked clothes and bodies in the trunk
Kelley Armstrong (Bitten (Otherworld, #1))
Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
Michael Ondaatje (In the Skin of a Lion)
Ryder, we got a problem,” Ristan called from beyond the other side of the etched-glass shower door. “Someone had better be dying, Ristan,” Ryder growled when he'd pulled away from kissing me. “They might be. You need to come see this.” “We will be right there,” Ryder called out as I slid down his hard body. He watched me with a smirk and then placed his hand on my arm to move me from beneath the water, so he could rinse off. I watched him, unable to pull my eyes off of his hands as they roved over his body.He was quicksand, and I was sinking. “Did you say we?” Ristan asked. I blushed from my head to my Paint Your Toron-Toes Rose colored toenails. I opened the shower door and stepped out meeting Ristan's eyes. “Don't ask.” “How the…did you sift into his shower?” he asked, bubbling with laughter. “I said don't ask! It wasn't my fault. I was sleeping!” I shouted as both men laughed even harder. “Real mature, just real fucking mature!
Amelia Hutchins (Taunting Destiny (The Fae Chronicles, #2))
look, you know i don't wanna come on ungrateful, but that warren report, you know as well as me, just didn't make it. You know, like they might as well have asked some banana salesman from des moines, who was up in toronto on the big day, if he saw anyone around looking suspicious/...
Bob Dylan (Tarantula)
You must realize from your studies, Miss Feng, with the complexity of our MEG society, algorithms have become indispensable for analysis and decision making in our data-saturated environment. Digitization creates information beyond the processing capacity of Human intelligence, yet provides a stable mental environment powered by a set of logical rules. That is how we keep order in Toronto MEG.” “Excuse me, Mr. Zhang,” Ke Hui said, somewhat uncomfortably, “but the invisibility of algorithmic systems and the obscurity of their operations hint at a society where algorithms do not reflect the public interest. Issues involving ethics and values I mean, from my reading of MEG history, challenge the assumptions of the neutrality of algorithmic systems. Would this not undermine democratic governance through reliance on technocratic resolutions?
Brian Van Norman (Against the Machine: Evolution)
It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while.
Alice Munro (Dear Life)
It's a sort of piss-take on culture, because a drag queen is a clown - a parody of our society. It's a sarcastic spoof on culture, which allows us to laugh at ourselves - but in a way that is inclusive of everyone.
RuPaul
Christianity is a religion in a rush. Look at the world created in seven days. Even on a symbolic level, that's creation in a frenzy. To one born in a religion where the battle for a single soul can be a relay race run over many centuries, with innumerable generations passing along the baton, the quick resolution of Christianity has a dizzying effect. If Hinduism flows placidly like the Ganges, then Christianity bustles like Toronto at rush hour. It is religion as swift as a swallow, as urgent as an ambulance. It turns on a dime, expresses itself in the instant. In a moment you are lost or saved. Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.
Yann Martel (Life of Pi)
...when I was a kid, Toronto streets were deserted and quiet on Sundays, except for the sound of church bells I stood on the sidewalk one December listening to the Christmas bells - I've never forgotten that moment...
John Geddes (A Familiar Rain)
This is the one thing I hope: that she never stopped. I hope when her body couldn’t run any farther she left it behind like everything else that tried to hold her down, she floored the pedal and she went like wildfire, streamed down night freeways with both hands off the wheel and her head back screaming to the sky like a lynx, white lines and green lights whipping away into the dark, her tires inches off the ground and freedom crashing up her spine. I hope every second she could have had came flooding through that cottage like speed wind: ribbons and sea spray, a wedding ring and Chad’s mother crying, sun-wrinkles and gallops through wild red brush, a baby’s first tooth and its shoulder blades like tiny wings in Amsterdam Toronto Dubai; hawthorn flowers spinning through summer air, Daniel’s hair turning gray under high ceilings and candle flames and the sweet cadences of Abby’s singing. Time works so hard for us, Daniel told me once. I hope those last few minutes worked like hell for her. I hope in that half hour she lived all her million lives.
Tana French (The Likeness)
...one's family is made up of supporting players in one's personal drama. One never supposes that they starred in some possibly gaudy and certainly deeply felt show of their own.
Robertson Davies (Murther and Walking Spirits (Toronto Trilogy, #1))
Those words should have sent Kurt's hackles up, but he was starting to realize a relationship meant protecting each other, because you couldn't bear for your partner to hurt.
K.C. Burn (Cop Out (Toronto Tales, #1))
I'm an old-fashioned guy. I believe in the Enlightenment, and reason, and logic, and you know, facts.
Barack Obama
Life is all about how you handle plan B
Suzy Toronto
I have walked all my life through this tarnished world. After she walked out of Toronto with her brother, after that first unremembered year, her brother had been plagued by nightmares. “The road,” he’d always said, when she shook him awake and asked what he’d been dreaming of. He’d said, “I hope you never remember it.
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
I'll have to figure it out for myself. That's thge problem with life. It's not really a spectator sport.
Heather Wardell (Planning to Live (Toronto, #3))
Q: Bigfoot, when my Guinea pig wake up? Parents say he sleeping in box in ground in bakc garden. Suzie, Ag 9, Toronto, Canada A: Actually Suzie Guinea pig dead and Bigfoot already dig up and eat. If want back Bigfoot probably poop out bones and fur ni day or so. Very delicious, raise him right, he taste like love.
Graham Roumieu (Bigfoot: I Not Dead)
His Facebook post is pure Jamie: Hi all. I feel like a heel doing this over Facebook, but I can’t reach everyone by tomorrow. You’re all going to discuss me on Sunday, anyway. And in case you think my account was hacked, it wasn’t. As proof I’ll confess that I’m the one who broke Mom’s Christmas tree angel when I was seven. It was death by baseball, but I swear she didn’t suffer. Anyway, I have to catch you up on a few developments. I’ve taken the coaching job in Toronto, and I’ve declined my spot in Detroit. This feels like the right career move, but there’s something else. I’m living with my boyfriend (that was not a typo.) His name is Wes, and we met at Lake Placid about nine years ago. In case you were lacking something to talk about over dinner, I’ve fixed that problem. Love you all. Jamie
Sarina Bowen (Him (Him, #1))
The beauty of ethics is that nobody can be perfectly certain about what it includes or even what it means.
Robertson Davies (Murther and Walking Spirits (Toronto Trilogy, #1))
I know a woman here in Toronto who is very dear to my heart. She was my foster mother. I call her Auntieji and she likes that. She is Quebecoise. Though she has lived in Toronto for over thirty years, her French-speaking mind still slips on occasion on the understanding of English sounds. And so, when she first heard of Hare Krishnas, she didn't hear right. She heard "Hairless Christians", and that is what they were to her for many years. When I corrected her, I told her that in fact she was not so wrong; that Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat-wearing Muslims.
Yann Martel
I couldn't relax unless I was doing something at the same time
Heather Wardell (Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo (Toronto, #1))
I don't have expensive tastes – just bloody ones. – Vampire Dragul Mangorian
John Matsui (Late Bite (Toronto Chronicles, #1))
That last stretch of the journey from Toronto to Crow Lake always takes me by the throat. Partly it's the familiarity; I know every tree, every rock, every boggy bit of marshland so well, that even though I almost always arrive after dark I can feel them around me, lying there in the darkness as if they were my own bones.
Mary Lawson (Crow Lake)
Canada is a sparsely populated nation, a mere 34 million people across a vast expanse of land. Consequently, as you grow up there, you encounter more weirdos who have been given a wider berth to stew in their weirdness and become gloriously eccentric. These are precisely the kinds of folks who served as our comic muses in Toronto. On top of this, the performers in Second City Toronto were a particularly nice, un-mean group,
Martin Short (I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend)
... Because the staging of human embryos is complex, owing to the continuous process of change during development, it is proposed that a new system of classification could be developed using the terms mentioned in the Qur'an and Sunnah. The proposed system is simple, comprehensive, and conforms with present embryological knowledge.287 (Dr. Keith L. Moore, Professor Emeritus, Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of Toronto)
Harun Yahya (Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an)
But if you fuck my friend over again, I will drive to Toronto, and I will kill you.
Carley Fortune (Meet Me at the Lake)
We can’t be together in Toronto,” I say. Just six little words. But they make his eyes turn red.
Sarina Bowen (Him (Him, #1))
Registration Day' by Gavin Gunhold (1899— ) Toronto Review of Poetry, 1947 On registration day at taxidermy school I distinctly saw the eyes of the stuffed moose Move.
Gordon Korman (A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag)
And while Canada purports to be multicultural, Toronto in particular, a place where everyone is holding hands and cops are handing out ice cream cones instead of, say, shooting black men, our inability to talk about race and its complexities actually means our racism is arguably more insidious. We rarely acknowledge it, and when we do, we're punished, as if we're speaking badly of an elderly relative who can't help but make fun of the Irish. The white majority doesn't like being reminded that the cultural landscape is still flawed, still broken...
Scaachi Koul (One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter)
Sheila left her hand outstretched for another moment, cold eyes locked on his face. Then she slowly pulled back and raised an eyebrow. “I should have assumed as much from your clothing. Tell me, Khalid: Where are you from?” “Toronto,” Khalid answered. His face flamed beneath his thick beard; he didn’t know where to look. “No,” Sheila laughed lightly. “I mean where are you from originally?” “Toronto,” Khalid responded again, and this time his voice was resigned. Clara shifted, looking tense and uncomfortable. “I’m originally from Newfoundland,” she said brightly.
Uzma Jalaluddin (Ayesha at Last)
Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.
Robertson Davies (The Cunning Man (Toronto Trilogy, #2))
People who have failed at Christianity aren't likely to make great Buddhists.
Robertson Davies (Murther and Walking Spirits (Toronto Trilogy, #1))
Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn’t remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt.
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
I want so badly to help you realize, Elizabeth Anne, how difficult and puzzling and full of wonder it all is: some day I will tell you how I learned to watch the shifting light of autumn days or smelled the earth through snow in March; how one winter morning God vanished from my life and how one summer evening I sat in a Ferris wheel, looking down on a man that hurt me badly; I will tell you how I once travelled to Rome and saw all the soldiers in that city of dead poets; I will tell you how I met your father outside a movie house in Toronto, and how you came to be. Perhaps that is where I will begin. On a winter afternoon when we turn the lights on early, or perhaps a summer day of leaves and sky, I will begin by conjugating the elemental verb. I am. You are. It is.
Richard B. Wright (Clara Callan)
The intensive studies of the Qur'an and Hadith in the last four years have revealed a system of classifying human embryos that is amazing since it was recorded in the seventh century A.D... the descriptions in the Qur'an cannot be based on scientific knowledge in the seventh century...288 (Dr. Keith L. Moore, Professor Emeritus, Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of Toronto)
Harun Yahya (Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an)
I had become wiser, I tried to find out what irony really is, and discovered that some ancient writer on poetry had spoken of “Ironia, which we call the drye mock.” And I cannot think of a better term for it: The drye mock. Not sarcasm, which is like vinegar, or cynicism, which is so often the voice of disappointed idealism, but a delicate casting of cool and illuminating light on life, and thus an enlargement. The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit’s desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement.
Robertson Davies (The Cunning Man (Toronto Trilogy, #2))
Amy Martin (ladysky) and Daniel Baciagalupo had a month to spend on Charlotte Turner's island in Georgian Bay; it was their wilderness way of getting to know each other before their life together in Toronto began. We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives. Little Joe was gone, but not a day passed in Daniel Baciagalupo's life when Joe wasn't loved or remembered. The cook had been murdered in his bed, but Dominic Baciagalupo had had the last laugh on the cowboy. Ketchum's left hand would lvie forever in Twisted River, and Six-Pack had known what to do with the rest of her old friend
John Irving (Last Night in Twisted River)
Who the fuck are you? Davy, were you on a fucking date?" Kurt wasn't sure how to express the anger coursing through him without an assault charge, and even though the asshole was no longer kissing or touching Davy, he was getting more irate. "What the fuck Kurt?" Ripping his mouth away, Davy panted. "What the fuck are you doing?" "Kissing you." Or perhaps devouring. "What makes it okay for you to kiss me and not Andrew?" The words weren't a simple question, but a sneering mockery. Kurt's anger returned full force and his hands moved to Davy's hair, yanking his mouth back within easy reach. "You're mine," he snarled before shoving his tongue back in Davy's mouth.
K.C. Burn (Cop Out (Toronto Tales, #1))
And that’s how Canning and I came to have a big framed photo on our living room wall featuring the entire Toronto team dressed in very loud gingham. I swear the color rendered a little bolder in print than it looks in real life, because this photo is kind of blinding. But Jamie snickers whenever I suggest that.
Sarina Bowen (Us (Him, #2))
She promised new, tantalizing diversions. She whispered words of raw, intense pleasure the likes of which he’d never experienced. He was intrigued. She had the power to drag his mind into his body and keep it there, unable to think or worry. And that was how he found himself in the basement of her town house in Toronto, naked, restrained, and on his knees. She confused his senses by both pleasing and punishing him. With every strike, all his emotional pain seemed to bleed away. His single errant thought was why had he waited so long to use physical pain to alleviate his mental suffering. But even that thought was soon forgotten.
Sylvain Reynard (Gabriel's Redemption (Gabriel's Inferno, #3))
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she swore in good mouth-filling oaths, but never smutty ones, and that was uncommon. She knew the prosody of profanity. . . . she knew the tune, as well as the words. She was not a raving beauty, but she had fine eyes and a Pre-Raphelite air of being too good for this world while at the same time exhibiting much of what this world desires in a woman, and I suppose I gaped at her and behaved clownishly.
Robertson Davies (The Cunning Man (Toronto Trilogy, #2))
A first meeting. A meeting in the desert, a meeting at sea, meeting in the city, meeting at night, meeting at a grave, meeting in the sunshine beside the forest, beside water. Human beings meet, yet the meetings are not the same. Meeting partakes in its very essence not only of the persons but of the place of meeting. And that essence of place remains, and colours, faintly, the association, perhaps forever. Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990 (page 95).
Ethel Wilson (Swamp Angel)
We’re lost in each other, in the heart of Toronto, slow dancing to nothing but the beat of my heart and the sound of her breath on my neck. I know the subway trains are trembling beneath my feet and that we’re amidst the constant buzz of city life, yet I hear nothing but my heart beating and feel nothing but her breath on my neck.
Shannon Mullen (See What Flowers)
I found Toronto an immensely likeable city, spacious and gentle and slightly dignified, but in a low-key, friendly way. The only people who didn’t seem to think much of it were its inhabitants, who could hardly wait for you to ask directions, because that gave them the perfect opportunity to apologise for it. What they were apologising for I never understood. I think they felt uninteresting, compared with America. I took the opposite view; I remember reading about the doctrine of American “Exceptionalism” and thinking that what I liked so much about Canadians was that they consider themselves unexceptional. This modest, unthreatening attitude seems to produce a nation that is stable, safe, decent and well respected. It’s just a shame that for seven months of the year it’s so cold that only Canadians would put up with it.
John Cleese (So Anyway)
I won't even mention the swift, transitory reward of lemon spray wax. Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework. Not surprisingly, she, always looking a little dérisoire, believes that women have been enslaved by their possessions. Acquiring and then tending--these eat up a woman's creativity, anyone's creativity. But I've been watching the ways she arranges articles on a shelf, and how carefully she sets a table, even with it is just me coming into Toronto to have lunch in her sunroom.
Carol Shields (Unless)
Of course I long for her, but in honesty I must say that I would rather long for her than have her continuously present. Travel agents assure us that 'getting there is half the fun'; I might say with at least equal truth that longing is some of the best of loving.
Robertson Davies (The Cunning Man (Toronto Trilogy, #2))
There's the satisfaction of Eng-Lang-and-Lit; somebody else has said everything for you, and said it better.
Robertson Davies (Murther and Walking Spirits (Toronto Trilogy, #1))
If life gives you lemons, then make lemonade.
Toronto Star
Are you New World or Old?' 'Sounds like a novel by Henry James.' 'Never read him.' 'Don't. But that was his question and he plumped for the Old.
Robertson Davies (Murther and Walking Spirits (Toronto Trilogy, #1))
I love my snake.
Gavin Toronto
For as long as I could remember I just wanted to get out, and then I got to Toronto and no one knew me. Toronto felt like freedom.
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
It’s cold in Toronto but I like where I’m living.
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
I once read that if the folds in the cerebral cortex were smoothed out it would cover a card table. That seemed quite unbelievable but it did make me wonder just how big the cortex would be if you ironed it out. I thought it might just about cover a family-sized pizza: not bad, but no card-table. I was astonished to realize that nobody seems to know the answer. A quick search yielded the following estimates for the smoothed out dimensions of the cerebral cortex of the human brain. An article in Bioscience in November 1987 by Julie Ann Miller claimed the cortex was a "quarter-metre square." That is napkin-sized, about ten inches by ten inches. Scientific American magazine in September 1992 upped the ante considerably with an estimated of 1 1/2 square metres; thats a square of brain forty inches on each side, getting close to the card-table estimate. A psychologist at the University of Toronto figured it would cover the floor of his living room (I haven't seen his living room), but the prize winning estimate so far is from the British magazine New Scientist's poster of the brain published in 1993 which claimed that the cerebral cortex, if flattened out, would cover a tennis court. How can there be such disagreement? How can so many experts not know how big the cortex is? I don't know, but I'm on the hunt for an expert who will say the cortex, when fully spread out, will cover a football field. A Canadian football field.
Jay Ingram (The Burning House : Unlocking the Mysteries of the Brain)
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Toronto,” he echoes. “What kind of city doesn’t have a football team? Explain that to me, Wes.” “They do have one,” I point out. “The Argonauts.” Richard narrows his eyes. “Is it an NFL team?” “Well, no, it’s CFL, but—” “Then they don’t have a team,” he says firmly. I stifle a laugh. Jamie warned me that his family was football fanatics, but I genuinely thought he was exaggerating.
Sarina Bowen (Him (Him, #1))
NO DIVINE BOVINE ! The clumsy creature currently inhabiting the White House is a distinctly dangerous animal. Part boneheaded raging bully, part dastardly coward showing signs of advanced stage mad cow disease. Neither of good pedigree nor useful breeding stock, there is essentially very little of substance between the T (bone) and the RUMP, except of course for an abundance of methane and bullshit. It's high time brave matadors for you to enter the bullring, with nimble step and fleet of foot. Take good aim and bring down this marauding beast once and for all. Slay public enemy number one and we will salute you forever. A louder cheer you will not hear from Madrid to Mexico City, from Beijing to Brussels, from London to Lahore, from Toronto to Tehran and ten thousand cities in between.
Alex Morritt (Impromptu Scribe)
The Brewers, feeling the crush of small-market economics and fearing injury problems, decided they couldn’t afford to keep Molitor, whom Bando regrettably referred to at one point as “just a DH.” Toronto swept in with a three-year, $13 million offer. “If Paul Molitor leaving the Brewers doesn’t show that the small markets are in trouble, nothing does,” Jim Gantner told the Milwaukee Sentinel at the time.
Bill Schroeder (If These Walls Could Talk: Milwaukee Brewers: Stories from the Milwaukee Brewers Dugout, Locker Room, and Press Box)
There were Italian neighbourhood and Vietnamese neighbourhoods in this city; there are Chinese ones and Ukrainian ones and Pakistani ones and Korean ones and African ones. Name a region on the planet and there's someone from there, here. All of them sit on Ojibway land, but hardly any of them know it or care because that genealogy is wilfully untraceable except in the name of the city itself. They'd only have to look, though, but it could be that what they know hurts them already, and what if they found out something even more damaging? These are people who are used to the earth beneath them shifting, and they all want it to stop-and if that means they must pretend to know nothing, well, that's the sacrifice they make.
Dionne Brand (What We All Long For)
There was a protest outside the Gilead Consulate in Toronto, but it wasn’t well attended: Melanie and Neil weren’t famous, and they weren’t politicians. I didn’t know whether to be sad or angry. Melanie and Neil being murdered made me angry, and so did remembering nice things they’d done when they were alive. But things that should have made me angry, such as why Gilead was being allowed to get away with it, only made me sad.
Margaret Atwood (The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2))
She didn’t remember what airplanes had looked like in flight but she did remember being inside one. The memory was sharper than most of her other memories from the time before, which she thought must mean that this had been very close to the end. She would have been seven or eight years old, and she’d gone to New York City with her mother, though she didn’t remember why. She remembered flying back to Toronto at night, her mother drinking a glass of something with ice cubes that clinked and caught the light. She remembered the drink but not her mother’s face. She’d pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness, the thought of all those people living out their lives, each porch light marking another house, another family.
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
And why are you wearing plastic? It's not plastic, Nate said, affronted. It's the same material mountain climbers use for protection at high altitudes. Hmm she said. You know Toronto's almost at sea level, right?
Ausma Zehanat Khan (Among the Ruins (Rachel Getty & Esa Khattak, #3))
The sun beams down on Algiers — but the inhabitants do not smile back. It is a surly city, harrowed by the stresses of over-population and under-employment; with the architecture of Cannes, but the atmosphere of Aberdeen. During the day the cafés are thronged with all-male, typically Arab society. At night the city, responsive to President Boumedienne’s own personal brand of puritanism, closes down like wartime Toronto on a Sunday.
Alistair Horne (A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962)
I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part, a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple solutions with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense.
Robertson Davies (The Cunning Man (Toronto Trilogy, #2))
I trust who I am with Jamie. He’s known me since I was a pimply thirteen-year-old when we used to argue about video games. He doesn’t see me as Toronto’s rookie forward. He doesn’t care about my scoring average. I don’t try to impress him.” Except with my ability to deep-throat. But we won’t talk about that on prime time. “He’s your family,” Dennis suggests. “More than your real family.” “Absolutely,” I agree. “Do you think you’ll get married?” Dennis asks with a smile. “Wait—am I putting you on the spot?” That bastard. He’s poking me in a sore spot just to lock in his ratings. But I stay cool. “Oh, it’s not me you’re putting on the spot. It’s Jamie. I’d marry him in a hot second, and I’m sure he knows it.
Sarina Bowen (Us (Him, #2))
Snobbery, like every other social attitude, takes its character from those who practise it. The snob is supposedly a mean creature, delighting in slight and trivial distinctions. But is the man who bathes every day a snob because he does not seek the company of the one-bath-a-week, one-shirt-a-week, one-pair-of-clean-drawers-a-week, one-pair-of-socks-a-week man?
Robertson Davies (Murther and Walking Spirits (Toronto Trilogy, #1))
There is a story for children, There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon, by Jack Kent, that I really like. It’s a very simple tale, at least on the surface. I once read its few pages to a group of retired University of Toronto alumni, and explained its symbolic meaning.*2 It’s about a small boy, Billy Bixbee, who spies a dragon sitting on his bed one morning. It’s about the size of a house cat, and friendly. He tells his mother about it, but she tells him that there’s no such thing as a dragon. So, it starts to grow. It eats all of Billy’s pancakes. Soon it fills the whole house. Mom tries to vacuum, but she has to go in and out of the house through the windows because of the dragon everywhere. It takes her forever. Then, the dragon runs off with the house. Billy’s dad comes home—and there’s just an empty space, where he used to live. The mailman tells him where the house went. He chases after it, climbs up the dragon’s head and neck (now sprawling out into the street) and rejoins his wife and son. Mom still insists that the dragon does not exist, but Billy, who’s pretty much had it by now, insists, “There is a dragon, Mom.” Instantly, it starts to shrink. Soon, it’s cat-sized again. Everyone agrees that dragons of that size (1) exist and (2) are much preferable to their gigantic counterparts. Mom, eyes reluctantly opened by this point, asks somewhat plaintively why it had to get so big. Billy quietly suggests: “maybe it wanted to be noticed.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, “No Drunk Natives.” Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the Lethbridge Herald to voice their outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke. Now, I’ll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It’s just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not. Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter’s generation. And let’s not forget some of our politicians and persons of power who control the fates of nations: Winston Churchill, John A. Macdonald, Boris Yeltsin, George Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hard drinkers, every one. The somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks. They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the ex-premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star Lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others. More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.
Thomas King (The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America)
He’d been spending more time in the past lately. He liked to close his eyes and let his memories overtake him. A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films: the school play when he was nine, his father beaming in the front row; clubbing with Arthur in Toronto, under whirling lights; a lecture hall at NYU. An executive, a client, running his hands through his hair as he talked about his terrible boss. A procession of lovers, remembered in details: a set of dark blue sheets, a perfect cup of tea, a pair of sunglasses, a smile. The Brazilian pepper tree in a friend’s backyard in Silver Lake. A bouquet of tiger lilies on a desk. Robert's smile. His mother's hands, knitting while she listened to the BBC.
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
When my father was 17, he went to Montreal and found these submarine sandwich shops that were really successful, and weren't in Toronto [his home town]. So he went to my grandparents and said: "Look, you have to give me the seed money to open up one of these places. We'll make a fortune. They've got lines going round the block. There's nothing like that here." And my grandfather's response was: "Look, I'm sure these sandwiches are really good, and if we scraped the money together we could make a lot of money and your mother and I would be really proud of you, but you need to find something that has *magic* in it for you." It was off of that conversation that my father went to college on a music scholarship, started a film club and became one of the most successful directors of all time.
Jason Reitman
This somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks. They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the X premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others. More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.
Thomas King (The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America)
The city had been built by people from innumerable elsewheres. It was a chaos of cultures ordered only by its long streets. It belonged to no one and never would, or maybe it was a million cities in one, unique to each of its inhabitants, belonging to whoever walked its streets.
André Alexis (The Hidden Keys (Quincunx, #4))
But in the end we found it impossible to ignore the impassioned pleas of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolaño’s prose. That the popularity of the spicy tuna roll and a black American president were to white male domination what the smallpox blankets were to Native American existence. Those inclined to believe in free will and the free market argue that the Lost City of White Male Privilege was responsible for its own demise, that the constant stream of contradictory religious and secular edicts from on high confused the highly impressionable white male. Reduced him to a state of such severe social and psychic anxiety that he stopped fucking. Stopped voting. Stopped reading. And, most important, stopped thinking that he was the end-all, be-all, or at least knew enough to pretend not to be so in public. But in any case, it became impossible to walk the streets of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, feeding your ego by reciting mythological truisms like “We built this country!” when all around you brown men were constantly hammering and nailing, cooking world-class French meals, and repairing your cars. You couldn’t shout “America, love it or leave it!” when deep down inside you longed to live in Toronto.
Paul Beatty (The Sellout)
It is woefully hard to find good, or even merely literate, writers, and they laugh at me when I say that sloppy, go-as-you-please writing carries less authority than decent prose. You must remember our public, they say. And indeed that is what I do, and I think the public is fully able to deal with the best they can produce. Patronizing the public, and assuming that it hangs, breathless, upon what it reads in the papers, is almost the worst of journalistic sins.
Robertson Davies (Murther and Walking Spirits (Toronto Trilogy, #1))
But most unsettling is how this time I notice my own fairness. I notice that while I might be a person of colour among the diaspora back home, or in any white-majority country, here I am the white person. Kashmiris are notable because there are so few of us left, and because we've taken up a privileged space in India. In Toronto, some Indian cab drivers will ask me where my family is from, and when I tell them, they think they're bonding with me when they talk about how much they hate Muslims. Or, in the case that the driver is Muslim, he'll try to bond with me over the trouble with 'the blacks.' All of us struggle towards whiteness.
Scaachi Koul (One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter)
It was strange, he said, but standing there on the sidewalk with the great grey chasms of Toronto's streets extending away to every side of him and the leash dangling from his hand, he had felt for the first time that he was at home: the feeling of having unwittingly caused an irreversible change, of his failure being the force that broke new ground, was, he realized standing there, the deepest and most familiar thing he knew. By failing he created loss, and loss was the threshold to freedom: an awkward and uncomfortable threshold, but the only one he had ever been able to cross; usually, he said, because he was shoved across it as a consequence of the events that had brought him there.
Rachel Cusk (Transit)
If you can get with the freaks, then we want you here.
Sarah Liss (Army of Lovers: A Community History of Will Munro (Exploded Views))
Every exam, every tournament, every match, every recital—there’s always some wrinkle, some misplaced calculator or sudden headache, a glaring sun or an unexpected essay question. At bottom, interleaving is a way of building into our daily practice not only a dose of review but also an element of surprise. “The brain is exquisitely tuned to pick up incongruities, all of our work tells us that,” said Michael Inzlicht, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto. “Seeing something that’s out of order or out of place wakes the brain up, in effect, and prompts the subconscious to process the information more deeply: ‘Why is this here?’ ” Mixed-up practice doesn’t just build overall dexterity and prompt active discrimination. It helps prepare us for life’s curveballs, literal and figurative.
Benedict Carey (How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens)
Briggs was living in Toronto at the time and had started a studio called Thunder Sound. He recorded the Massey Hall show. He thought this live show should have come out right away and was disappointed and disagreed with my decision to instead put out Harvest-he thought it was not as good as the Massey Hall recording. "It's great, Neil," Briggs said. "Put it out there." But that was not to be. When I heard the show thirty-four years later while reviewing tapes for my archive performance series, I was a little shocked-I agreed with David. After listening, I felt his frustration. This was better than Harvest. It meant more. He was right. I had missed it. He understood it. David was usually right, and when I disagreed with him, I was usually wrong. Every time I go into the studio or onstage, he is missed.
Neil Young (Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream)
In four months Miranda will be back in Toronto, divorced at twenty-seven, working on a commerce degree, spending her alimony on expensive clothing and consultations with stylists because she’s come to understand that clothes are armor; she will call Leon Prevant to ask about employment and a week later she’ll be back at Neptune Logistics, in a more interesting job now, working under Leon in Client Relations, rising rapidly through the company until she comes to a point after four or five years when she travels almost constantly between a dozen countries and lives mostly out of a carry-on suitcase, a time when she lives a life that feels like freedom and sleeps with her downstairs neighbor occasionally but refuses to date anyone, whispers “I repent nothing” into the mirrors of a hundred hotel rooms from London to Singapore and in the morning puts on the clothes that make her invincible, a life where the moments of emptiness and disappointment are minimal, where by her midthirties she feels competent and at last more or less at ease in the world, studying foreign languages in first-class lounges and traveling in comfortable seats across oceans, meeting with clients and living her job, breathing her job, until she isn’t sure where she stops and her job begins, almost always loves her life but is often lonely, draws the stories of Station Eleven in hotel rooms at night.
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
You know,” a low voice drawls as a warm hand squeezes my shoulder. “There’s time to feed the kitty before we get dressed for the big day.” He’s so near that parts of me tingle even in my outrage. “Blake,” I say, my voice almost a whisper. “Yes,” he breathes beside my ear. “I don’t have a cat.” He lets out a sexy rumble, his thumb trailing down my arm. And it’s then that I realize feed the kitty means… “We aren’t feeding the kitty or hiding the salami or anything else you can think of to call it. We’re just not. There will be no repeats this weekend.” He reaches beneath my wet hair and cups the back of my head, his long fingers trailing across my skull. Goosebumps break out all over my body. “Never say never, J-Babe.
Sarina Bowen (Good Boy (WAGs, #1))
But even Wagner, with his magnificent music and his rather less worthy pseudo-medieval words, is never wholly successful. Why? Because a work of art must be in some measure coherent; but thought and feeling mingled, as all of us experience them, are surging and incoherent. Thought and feeling trimmed into coherence in a work of art are still far from reality, still far from the agonizing confusion that rises like miasma in what a great poet has called the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
Robertson Davies (Murther and Walking Spirits (Toronto Trilogy, #1))
I’m speechless. But my dick has plenty to say. I’m already hard at the idea of Wes being prepped and ready for me. I drop my mouth onto his and he moans again. My tongue glides across his piercing and we’re off to the horny dog races. We kiss as if there’s a meteor heading straight for the Toronto metropolitan area. Wes’s eager hands roam my ass while I suck on his tongue. His eagerness is like a drug, and I want hit after hit. I can feel how hard he is, even through all of our clothes. He wants me to fuck him, and he’s all primed and ready? “Mmm,” I moan into his mouth. Sexiest fucking thing I ever heard. That’s when the doorbell rings. “Hold that thought,” I say, pushing up on one arm. “Nooooo!” Wes lifts both his legs to trap me in them. “No.” Kiss. “No.” Kiss. “Don’t even think about it.” Pinning his hands to the quilt is easy, because he’s horny to the point of distraction. “Stop it, baby. It’s the couch delivery. We’re paying seventy-five bucks for them to show up on a Saturday.
Sarina Bowen (Him (Him, #1))
Several years ago I was lecturing in British Columbia. Dr [Simon] Wessely was speaking and he gave a thoroughly enjoyable lecture on M.E. and CFS. He had the hundreds of staff physicians laughing themselves silly over the invented griefs of the M.E. and CFS patients who according to Dr Wessely had no physical illness what so ever but a lot of misguided imagination. I was appalled at his sheer effectiveness, the amazing control he had over the minds of the staid physicians….His message was very clear and very simple. If I can paraphrase him: “M.E. and CFS are non-existent illnesses with no pathology what-so-ever. There is no reason why they all cannot return to work tomorrow. The next morning I left by car with my crew and arrived in Kelowna British Columbia that afternoon. We were staying at a patient’s house who had severe M.E. with dysautanomia and was for all purposes bed ridden or house bound most of the day. That morning she had received a phone call from her insurance company in Toronto. (Toronto is approximately 2742 miles from Vancouver). The insurance call was as follows and again I paraphrase: “Physicians at a University of British Columbia University have demonstrated that there is no pathological or physiological basis for M.E. or CFS. Your disability benefits have been stopped as of this month. You will have to pay back the funds we have sent you previously. We will contact you shortly with the exact amount you owe us”. That night I spoke to several patients or their spouses came up to me and told me they had received the same message. They were in understandable fear. What is important about this story is that at that meeting it was only Dr Wessely who was speaking out against M.E. and CFS and how … were the insurance companies in Toronto and elsewhere able to obtain this information and get back to the patients within a 24 hour period if Simon Wessely was not working for the insurance industry… I understand that it was also the insurance industry who paid for Dr Wessely’s trip to Vancouver.
Byron Hyde
It is not as easy to forgive my father. I’m going to come to Toronto and kick your ass. When his kid needed safety, when his kid needed love, when his kid needed protection, he threatened violence. Outraged because I had the audacity to communicate with an older man on the internet when I was a minor. If I didn’t deserve care in that moment, if I didn’t deserve safety and love, when would I ever? That sentence has lived in my body much longer than the man’s threats, his obsession, his fingers fondling my arm.
Elliot Page (Pageboy: A Memoir)
Jamie and I arrived in California two days ago, but since I had a game the first night, Jamie went to his folks’ place while I stayed at the hotel with my teammates. After the team crushed San Jose, I did the usual post-game press, and then yesterday morning I drove up to San Rafael to join Jamie and his family. The big holiday meal today will be the real test of their acceptance. I’ve already met Jamie’s mom and dad and one brother. So far, so good. “These need to be chopped into smaller pieces,” Cindy tells me. She smacks my butt to move me aside, then takes my place. “Have a seat at the counter. You can watch while I chop. Take notes if you need to.” I grin at her. “So I guess Jamie didn’t tell you how much I suck at cooking, huh?” “He most certainly did not.” She fixes me with a stern look. “But you’ll have to learn, because I can’t spend all my time worrying that my baby boy isn’t being fed over there in Siberia.” “Toronto,” I correct with a snort. “And I’m sure you can guess he’s the one who’s been feeding me.
Sarina Bowen (Him (Him, #1))
What does it mean to be a Canadian? Not only is it a wildly pretentious way to start a book, it is also a question that has beguiled us since day one. Canada has been called a lot of things. We have been called one of the world's greatest democracies. We have been called a shining beacon of hope for those fleeing tyranny. Readers of the Toronto Star will know us as an evil construct built on the shame that is colonialism. And, of course, we have been called stunningly beautiful and a terrible place to winter. We are nothing if not self-deprecating. We pride ourselves on not taking ourselves too seriously.
Rick Mercer (The Road Years: A Memoir, Continued . . .)
When I was eight we moved again, to another post-war bungalow, this time nearer the centre of Toronto, at that time a stodgy provincial city of seven hundred thousand. I was now faced with real life, in the form of other little girls — their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip, and an inability to pick up earthworms without wriggling all over and making mewing noises like a kitten. I was more familiar with the forthright mind set of boys: the rope burn on the wrist and the dead-finger trick were familiar to me — but little girls were almost an alien species. I was very curious about them, and remain so.
Margaret Atwood (Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing)
She seemed nice, but she was most likely one of those American women whose knowledge of Africa was based largely on movies and National Geographic and thirdhand information from someone who knew someone who had been to somewhere on the continent, usually Kenya or South Africa. Whenever Jende met such women (at Liomi’s school; at Marcus Garvey Park; in the livery cab he used to drive), they often said something like, oh my God, I saw this really crazy show about such-and-such in Africa. Or, my cousin/friend/neighbor used to date an African man, and he was a really nice guy. Or, even worse, if they asked him where in Africa he was from and he said Cameroon, they proceeded to tell him that a friend’s daughter once went to Tanzania or Uganda. This comment used to irk him until Winston gave him the perfect response: Tell them your friend’s uncle lives in Toronto. Which was what he now did every time someone mentioned some other African country in response to him saying he was from Cameroon. Oh yeah, he would say in response to something said about Senegal, I watched a show the other day about San Antonio. Or, one day I hope to visit Montreal. Or, I hear Miami is a nice city. And every time he did this, he cracked up inside as the Americans’ faces scrunched up in confusion because they couldn’t understand what Toronto/San Antonio/Montreal/Miami had to do with New York.
Imbolo Mbue (Behold the Dreamers)
My aunt and uncle went to Toronto in a last ditch effort to save their marriage. Uncle Bob had a tumultuous, abusive upbringing, and as a result became somewhat tumultuous and angry as an adult. Aunt Patsy was commonly referred to as the “super Christian” in our family, and together they obviously had their struggles. Pat struggled with Bob’s anger issues, and Bob struggled with a deep sense of shame and guilt that he was, in some ways, a spiritual outcast compared to Pat. His personal issues clouded his sense of self-worth, and that only made things worse. By the time they entered the doors in Toronto, it was do-or-die time. God had to show up for them, or it was over. At this point, only God could save their marriage.
Darren Wilson (Filming God: A Journey From Skepticism to Faith)
A group of tiny warriors no more than 2" high, their dark skins making them almost impossible to see, were silently surrounding an unsuspecting rodent. The kill was quick, the prey lifted in half a dozen miniature arms, & to Claire's surprise, thrown against the 3rd rail. There was a sudden flash, a wisp of smoke, & tiny voices chanting: "Bar. Be. Que! Bar! Be! Que!
Tanya Huff (The Second Summoning (Keeper's Chronicles, #2))
While all of us dread being blamed, we all would wish to be more responsible—that is, to have the ability to respond with awareness to the circumstances of our lives rather than just reacting. We want to be the authoritative person in our own lives: in charge, able to make the authentic decisions that affect us. There is no true responsibility without awareness. One of the weaknesses of the Western medical approach is that we have made the physician the only authority, with the patient too often a mere recipient of the treatment or cure. People are deprived of the opportunity to become truly responsible. None of us are to be blamed if we succumb to illness and death. Any one of us might succumb at any time, but the more we can learn about ourselves, the less prone we are to become passive victims. Mind and body links have to be seen not only for our understanding of illness but also for our understanding of health. Dr. Robert Maunder, on the psychiatric faculty of the University of Toronto, has written about the mindbody interface in disease. “Trying to identify and to answer the question of stress,” he said to me in an interview, “is more likely to lead to health than ignoring the question.” In healing, every bit of information, every piece of the truth, may be crucial. If a link exists between emotions and physiology, not to inform people of it will deprive them of a powerful tool. And here we confront the inadequacy of language. Even to speak about links between mind and body is to imply that two discrete entities are somehow connected to each other. Yet in life there is no such separation; there is no body that is not mind, no mind that is not body. The word mindbody has been suggested to convey the real state of things. Not even in the West is mind-body thinking completely new. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates quotes a Thracian doctor’s criticism of his Greek colleagues: “This is the reason why the cure of so many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas; they are ignorant of the whole. For this is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the mind from the body.” You cannot split mind from body, said Socrates—nearly two and a half millennia before the advent of psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology!
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
Some people will tell you that Toronto, in the summer, is the nothing more than a cesspool of pollution, garbage, and the smells of a hundred ethnicities competing for top spot in a race won historically by curry, garlic, and the occasional cauldron of boiled cabbage. Take a walk down College Street West, Gerrard Street East, or the Danforth, and you'll see; then, they add—these people, complaining—that the stench is so pervasive, so incorrigible, nor merely for lack of wind, but for the ninety-nine percent humidity, which, after a rainstorm, adds an eradicable bottom-note of sweaty Birkenstocks and the organic tang of decaying plant life. This much is true; there is, however, more to the story. Take a walk down the same streets and you'll find racks of the most stunning saris—red with navy brocade, silver, canary, vermillion and chocolate; marts with lahsun and adrak, pyaz and pudina; windows of gelato, zeppole, tiramisu; dusty smoke shops with patio-bistros; you'll find dove-white statuary of Olympian goddesses, mobs in blue jerseys, primed for the World Cup—and more, still, the compulsory banter of couples who even after forty years can turn foul words into the bawdiest, more unforgettable laughter (and those are just the details). Beyond them is the container, the big canvas brushed with parks and valleys and the interminable shore; a backdrop of ferries and islands, gulls and clouds—sparkles of a million wave-tips as the sun decides which colours to leave on its journey to new days. No, Toronto, in the summer, is the most paradisiacal place in the world.
Kit Ingram (Paradise)
POEM – MY AMAZING TRAVELS [My composition in my book Travel Memoirs with Pictures] My very first trip I still cannot believe Was planned and executed with such great ease. My father, an Inspector of Schools, was such a strict man, He gave in to my wishes when I told him of the plan. I got my first long vacation while working as a banker One of my co-workers wanted a travelling partner. She visited my father and discussed the matter Arrangements were made without any flutter. We travelled to New York, Toronto, London, and Germany, In each of those places, there was somebody, To guide and protect us and to take us wonderful places, It was a dream come true at our young ages. We even visited Holland, which was across the Border. To drive across from Germany was quite in order. Memories of great times continue to linger, I thank God for an understanding father. That trip in 1968 was the beginning of much more, I visited many countries afterward I am still in awe. Barbados, Tobago, St. Maarten, and Buffalo, Cirencester in the United Kingdom, Miami, and Orlando. I was accompanied by my husband on many trips. Sisters, nieces, children, grandchildren, and friends, travelled with me a bit. Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, New York, and Hialeah, Curacao, Caracas, Margarita, Virginia, and Anguilla. We sailed aboard the Creole Queen On the Mississippi in New Orleans We traversed the Rockies in Colorado And walked the streets in Cozumel, Mexico. We were thrilled to visit the Vatican in Rome, The Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. To explore the countryside in Florence, And to sail on a Gondola in Venice. My fridge is decorated with magnets Souvenirs of all my visits London, Madrid, Bahamas, Coco Cay, Barcelona. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa How can I forget the Spanish Steps in Rome? Stratford upon Avon, where Shakespeare was born. CN Tower in Toronto so very high I thought the elevator would take me to the sky. Then there was El Poble and Toledo Noted for Spanish Gold We travelled on the Euro star. The scenery was beautiful to behold! I must not omit Cartagena in Columbia, Anaheim, Las Vegas, and Catalina, Key West, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Pembroke Pines, Places I love to lime. Of course, I would like to make special mention, Of two exciting cruises with Royal Caribbean. Majesty of the Seas and Liberty of the Seas Two ships which grace the Seas. Last but not least and best of all We visited Paris in the fall. Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Berlin Amazing places, which made my head, spin. Copyright@BrendaMohammed
Brenda C. Mohammed (Travel Memoirs with Pictures)
Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry and that in order to regain your health you should donate something to the church, make a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness. Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you and that she could cast it out using song, dance, and the blood of a black cockerel. In the Middle East, doctors brought up on classical traditions might explain that your four bodily humors were out of balance and that you should harmonize them with a proper diet and foul-smelling potions. In India, Ayurvedic experts would offer their own theories concerning the balance between the three bodily elements known as doshas and recommend a treatment of herbs, massages, and yoga postures. Chinese physicians, Siberian shamans, African witch doctors, Amerindian medicine men—every empire, kingdom, and tribe had its own traditions and experts, each espousing different views about the human body and the nature of sickness, and each offering their own cornucopia of rituals, concoctions, and cures. Some of them worked surprisingly well, whereas others were little short of a death sentence. The only thing that united European, Chinese, African, and American medical practices was that everywhere at least a third of all children died before reaching adulthood, and average life expectancy was far below fifty.14 Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live. In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran, or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar-looking hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian, Japanese, Iranian, and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.15 Presumably even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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In the real world, however, the claim that censorship or enforced orthodoxy protects minorities and the marginalized has been comprehensively disproved, again and again and again. “Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”30 They and former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, in her powerful book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, list the horrors and oppressions which have befallen minorities in the name of making society safe from dangerous ideas. “Laws censoring ‘hate speech’ have predictably been enforced against those who lack political power,” writes Strossen.31 In America, under the Alien and Sedition Acts, authorities censored and imprisoned sympathizers of the opposition party (including members of Congress) and shut down opposition newspapers; under the Comstock laws, they censored works by Aristophanes, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce (among others); under the World War I anti-sedition laws, they convicted more than a thousand peace activists, including the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell.32 In more recent times, when the University of Michigan adopted one of the first college speech codes in 1988, the code was seized upon to charge Blacks with racist speech at least twenty times.33 When the United Kingdom passed a hate-speech law, the first person to be convicted was a Black man who cursed a white police officer.34 When Canadian courts agreed with feminists that pornography could be legally restricted, authorities in Toronto promptly charged Canada’s oldest gay bookstore with obscenity and seized copies of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude.35 All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.
Jonathan Rauch (The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth)
Not all monotheisms are exactly the same at the moment. They're all based on the same illusion. They're all plagiarisms of each other, but there is one in particular that at the moment is proposing a serious menace not just to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but to quite a lot of other freedoms too. And this is the religion that exhibits the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness, and self-pity. I am talking about militant Islam. Globally, it's a gigantic power. It controls an enormous amount of oil wealth, several large countries and states, and with an enormous fortune it's pumping the ideologies of Wahhabism and Salafism around the world, poisoning societies where it goes, ruining the minds of children, stultifying the young in its madrassas, training people in violence, making a cult of death and suicide and murder. That's what it does globally. It's quite strong. In our societies it poses as a cringing minority, whose faith you might offend, who deserves all the protection that a small and vulnerable group might need. Now, it makes quite large claims for itself, doesn't it? It says it's the Final Revelation. It says that God spoke to one illiterate businessman in the Arabian Peninsula three times through an archangel, and that the resultant material—which as you can see as you read it is largely plagiarized ineptly from the Old and The New Testament—is to be accepted as the Final Revelation and as the final and unalterable one, and that those who do not accept this revelation are fit to be treated as cattle infidels, potential chattel, slaves and victims. Well, I tell you what, I don't think Muhammad ever heard those voices. I don't believe it. And the likelihood that I am right—as opposed to the likelihood that a businessman who couldn't read had bits of the Old and The New Testament re-dictated to him by an archangel—I think puts me much more near the position of being objectively correct. But who is the one under threat? The person who promulgates this and says I'd better listen because if I don't I'm in danger, or me who says, "No, I think this is so silly you can even publish a cartoon about it"? And up go the placards and the yells and the howls and the screams—this is in London, this is in Toronto, this is in New York, it's right in our midst now—"Behead those who cartoon Islam." Do they get arrested for hate speech? No. Might I get in trouble for saying what I just said about the prophet Muhammad? Yes, I might. Where are your priorities, ladies and gentlemen? You're giving away what is most precious in your own society, and you're giving it away without a fight, and you're even praising the people who want to deny you the right to resist it. Shame on you while you do this. Make the best use of the time you've got left.
Christopher Hitchens