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“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, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination

“The trees were making their spring sounds, popping and cracking, the snow blowing by and whooshing against her skin, and spring birds making their small and distinctive calls”
― Aimée Craft, Treaty Words: For As Long As the Rivers Flow

“It used to be that you could get a lot of recognition by writing about Canada, as long as it was about small towns and nature.'
'Really?'
'Yeah. You could have canoes and the prairies or, also, sad women, very sad women who were fat or whose husbands had left them or something. There was a lady who wrote about fucking a bear, which was like a union with the land. There was a lady who wrote about mystical experiences she had at a cottage in northern Ontario. I was never sure what that was about. They were very important at one time, very stern and important. I had to study them in school. Anyway, he was one of them. He concentrated on the prairies, with a lot of native names, and wise native people, like there's a young boy with an Ojibway grandmother who will teach him the ways of the forest, sort of thing, and there's a lot of history, like a lot of the Riel rebellion for example.'
'The what?'
'History. And there's a lot of disaster, on the prairies, like people having to rebuild their sod houses after floods and so on.'
They drove on the humming highway for a while.
Then Nicola said, 'So you haven't answered my question.'
'What question?'
'Do you think he's any good?'
'Oh. The thing is... it's not, it doesn't matter. It's important. So it doesn't matter if I think it's good or not.'
'Okay. So it doesn't matter. So I'm asking you. What you think. Do. You. Think. It's. Good.' She slapped her bare thigh.
James paused for a long moment... He said, 'There's one Boben book, I think it's Cold Season, or maybe it's Comfort of Winter, which ends with the line, "a story which Canadians must never tire of telling." What do you think of that line? A story which Canadians must never tire of telling.'
She shrugged. 'I have no idea.'
'I'll tell you what you think of it. You don't give a shit. I'll tell you what I think of it. I don't give a shit either. But I also think it's the worst bullshit I've ever heard. I think,' he said, accelerating, 'that Ludwig Boben is a fucking asshole.”
― Russell Smith, Noise

“The question, then, is not whether boy should meet girl in Winnipeg or in New York; instead it is, What happens in Canadian literature when boy meets girl? And what sort of boy, and what sort of girl? If you've got this far, you may predict that when boy meets girl she gets cancer and he gets hit by a meteorite. . . .”
― Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature

“We didn’t talk much. The things I’d needed to say before didn’t matter anymore and what mattered now was too hard to hear. So Jamie didn’t tell me he’d be gone before Christmas, or that I was the first girl he ever loved. I didn’t tell him I had wanted it to be him all along, or that he was my first everything. Instead, we sat shivering and holding hands, and let ourselves believe we were lucky just a little while longer.”
― Jessica Raya, Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit

“No matter what else we do with our lives, Maggie, music will soothe and calm us. Music will last, and outlast, and cast its spell and enter our souls and connect us across time and distance. We must believe this, both of us, all of us.”
― Frances Itani, Tell

“…for as long as the sun shines, the grass grows, and the rivers flow. Like the original treaty.”
― Aimée Craft, Treaty Words: For As Long As the Rivers Flow

“Every person was born with a set of spiritual instructions or understandings, my girl. It’s what we do with it that defines us as human beings.”
― Aimée Craft, Treaty Words: For As Long As the Rivers Flow

“But maybe when you never say a thing, your thoughts spread like mould.”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Little Cat

“He brushed a fingertip over his lips and signalled across the room. "Now I’m going to take you home." But it meant something else, too. Grania’s cheeks reddened furiously when he made this public-private display, though no one else had noticed.”
― Frances Itani, Deafening

“Say your fears into the dark, my darling, and they will go away.”
― Frances Itani, Deafening

“But what did she want? Mostly she wanted to be loved and left alone. Not sequentially, but simultaneously. Love me. And leave me the fuck alone.”
― Missy Marston, Bad Ideas: A Novel

“Buffalo belong to the Creator.”
― Deirdre Havrelock

“Up in the sky, a star twinkled just right. The Buffalo understood.
Millions of heavy-hoofed beasts stormed the heavens, jolting Kokum from bed.”
― Deirdre Havrelock, Buffalo Wild

“Buffalo belong to the Creator.”
― Deidre Havrelock, Buffalo Wild!