“There's real strangeness in this world of ours. Back in the machine times, there was so much noise front and back, so to speak, it kept us from knowing what lies behind the surface of things.”

Source: The Return

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), p. 54

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 1
Context: Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.

As reported by Quoteinvestigator on January 11, 2011 http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/01/11/what-lies-within/ the quote appeared in “Meditations in Wall Street” (1940) by Wall Street trader Henry Stanley Haskins, "a Wall Street trader with a checkered background. The phrase was misattributed because the true author's name was initially withheld. In addition, the assignment of the maxim to a more prestigious individual, e.g., Emerson or Thoreau, made it more attractive and more believable as a nugget of wisdom." Emerson made a number of similar statements — in "The American Scholar," for example, he says "Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds" — which probably increased the likelihood of misattribution.
Misattributed
Variant: What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Variant: What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

"Out of the Darkness" in The Guardian (18 March 2006) <!-- DEAD LINK http://www.elainedundy.com/Guardian/guardian.html -->
Context: Sitting in the impressive high-ceilinged hall, an examiner had just given me the test on my eyes, which I failed again. She was talking to me but I was distracted by a blind man with dark glasses walking at some distance from me, his white cane clattering, echoing as it tap tapped away on the floor. What the examiner was repeating — and these are her exact words — was: "There is no cause and no cure for AMD yet." The dam burst. I began to cry, tears running down my face, sudden, unstoppable, embarrassing. In the restroom, I collapsed. My arms were shaking, my fingers stiffened, froze, and then tingled. My stomach was in an uproar. And I kept crying, knowing that I would never go back to seeing what I used to see.
I felt hopeless, defenceless; worst of all, I felt timid. I was crying for my dead self. Up to now I'd been congratulating myself for bearing up so well. Now I realised this was because the ophthalmologists always referred to AMD as a disease. For me it meant there would be a cure. Now I knew there would be no new glasses, no medication, no surgery.

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 10

Letter to parents (December 2013)

Source: Embroideries