Quotes about searching
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“Do not, under any circumstances belittle a works of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

Life, Truth, Reality

“Everyone has his or her own way of learning things. His way isn't the same as mine, nor mine as his. But we're both in search of our destinies, and I respect him for that.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Way, Learning

“I've been going insane reading my students' papers. Apparently several of them think the Hubble Space Telescope is used to search the universe for hubbles."
~ Ithana Aaronson”

Jeanne Birdsall (1951) American children's writer

Source: The Penderwicks on Gardam Street

Thinking, Universe, Reading

“Let those who wish have their respectability- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous, and the romantic.”

Richard Halliburton (1900–1939) American writer

The Royal Road to Romance (1925).
Context: Youth -- nothing else worth having in the world... and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability -- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.

Beauty, Freedom

“I did Google him, you know."
"Oh, so you GOOGLED him Oh, well, that changes everything then, doesn't it? What could I possibly worry about now that I know you've conducted such a thorough Internet search?”

Alyson Nöel (1965) writer

Source: Fated

Change

“I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, becuase I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Searching is half the fun: life is much more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Variant: Life is more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party.

Life

“It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

“And I wonder how Gage knew this is what my soul has craved. He turns me to face him, his eyes searching. It occurs to me that no one in my life has ever concerned himself so thoroughly with my happiness.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Sugar Daddy

Life, Soul, Happiness

“But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.”

Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day

Source: The Remains of the Day

Past

“Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don't fight them. Just find a new way to stand.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Way, Fight

“Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Effort, Heart

“When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.”

George Bernard Shaw Back to Methuselah

Source: Back to Methuselah

Truth

“Often in the search for your destiny you will find yourself obliged to change direction”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Change

“Your still searching for me in every woman. You'll always seek to duplicate what we had. You know it.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Understanding

“Maybe she'd always been there. Maybe strangers enter your heart first and then you spent the rest of your life searching for them.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: The Piper's Son

Life, Heart

“Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)
Context: Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn't allow one to think of anything else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external exile. It is not certain, however, that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with actuality. He may also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in other countries, on other shores, to recover, at least for short moments, his true vocation — which is to contemplate Being.

People, Truth, Reality, Silence

“There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Game, Tear, Hurt

“Maybe we've lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we've found each other… I know I've spent each life before this one searching for you. Not someone like you but you, for your soul and mine must always come together.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

Life, Soul

“You can either be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It all depends on how you view your life.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Variant: I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It's all a question of how I view my life.
Source: Eleven Minutes (2003), p. 37.

Life, World, Dependency

“We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church

Love, Truth, Help

“Oh, I don't read. I skulk about in search of quotations that might make me appear educated.”

Tasha Alexander (1969) American writer

Source: A Fatal Waltz

Education, Appearance, Reading

“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977) Nigerian writer

http://uzomediangr.com/tag/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-quotes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

Travel, Home, Thinking

“I'd been staring at the search term for at least five minutes. One
word. Necromancer.”

Kelley Armstrong book The Summoning

Source: The Summoning

“We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.”

Nicole Krauss book Great House

Source: Great House

Waiting

“Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Cats, Help

“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Source: Living Out Loud

Life, Change, Reading, Personality

“I killed her once and died for her many times and I still have nothing to show for it. I always search for her; I always remember her. I carry the hope that someday she will remember me.”

Ann Brashares book My Name is Memory

Source: My Name Is Memory

Hope, Time

“I’ll distract them,” Carter said. “You search. The Trophy room is through there.”
“Carter!”
But the fool ran off to protect me. I hate when he does that.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Hate, Fools

“We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”

Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) American writer

Family, For Men, World, Travel

“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Winter, 1931-1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Life

“Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

People, Hurt, Cry, Happiness

“If any man can convince me and bring home to me that I do not think or act aright, gladly will I change; for I search after truth, by which man never yet was harmed. But he is harmed who abideth on still in his deception and ignorance.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Variant translation: If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one ever was truly harmed. Harmed is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance.
VI, 21
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VI

Truth, Home, Thinking, Change

“…In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.”

Dan Brown book Angels & Demons

Source: Angels & Demons

Truth

“True love would look a second time. True love would not be thwarted. True love would not accept no for an answer. He would search the world and certainly look again and again in every cottage until he finds you.”

Alex Flinn (1966) American children's writer

Source: A Kiss in Time

Love, World, Time

“It was unfair that people who longed for love the most, searched the hardest for it, found it so elusive.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Tempt Me at Twilight

Love, People

“If I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it - keep going, keep going come what may.”

Vincent Van Gogh book The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

1880s, 1880, Letter to Theo (Cuesmes, July 1880)
Source: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Context: I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may.
But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.

“Every search begins with beginner’s luck. And every search ends with the victor’s being severely tested.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

“This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship - the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles

Change

“A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Variant: He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle.
Source: The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

Depressing, Life, Light, Appearance

“Stranger, pause and look;
From the dust of ages
Lift this little book,
Turn the tattered pages,
Read me, do not let me die!
Search the fading letters finding
Steadfast in the broken binding
All that once was I!”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Source: Collected Poems

Books, Age, Reading

“It be better, I think, to climb out in search of something, instead of hating, what you're leaving.”

Lois Lowry Son

Source: Son

Hate, Thinking

“I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) German film director, screenwriter, and actor

Love, Life, Idea, Personality

“A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Life, Truth, Beauty, Success

“Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

Science

“I always search for her; I always remember her. I carry the hope that someday she will remember me.”

Ann Brashares book My Name is Memory

Source: My Name Is Memory

Hope

“A kid might help another kid who fell into a river, and a kid might help another kid search for a lost baseball, but there isn't a kid I've met who will help another kid out of a humiliating situation. We just aren't built that way.”

David Lubar (1954) Children's writer and game programmer

Source: Hidden Talents

Way, Help

“Sometimes that mountain you've been climbing is just a grain of sand, and what you've been up there searching for forever, is in your hands. When you figure out love is all that matters after all it sure makes everything else seem so small.”

Carrie Underwood (1983) American country music singer

Love, Mountain

“Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

Walt Whitman Song of Myself

Source: Song of Myself

Waiting

“When we attach value to things that aren’t love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Source: Return to Love

Love, Money, Cars, Housing

“If in any quest for magic, in any search for sorcery, witchery, legerdemain, first check the human spirit.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Source: The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories

“You have such interesting thoughts. No wonder witches are ephemeral. You drive yourself crazy. You should simply do what you want without the soul-searching. It will be easier in the long run, Rachel Mariana Morgan.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Soul

“I take my spirit and I smash my mirrors,
And now the whole world is here for me to see,
Now I'm searching for my love to be.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

Room Full Of Mirrors
Song lyrics, Rainbow Bridge (1971)
Context: I used to live in a room full of mirrors,
All I could see was me.
Then I take my spirit and I smash my mirrors,
And now the whole world is here for me to see,
Now I'm searching for my love to be.

Love, World

“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Independence Day address (1821)
Context: America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.

Freedom, Heart