Quotes about the world
page 37

“Words and a book and a belief that the world is words…”

David Foster Wallace book The Broom of the System

Source: The Broom of the System

“There's no trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Books

“I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.”

Marilynne Robinson (1943) American novelist and essayist

Source: When I Was a Child I Read Books

Love, God, Imagination, Thinking

“There was much to hate in this world and too much to love.”

Gregory Maguire book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Love, Hate

“You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

People

“We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Painting

“Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding. I am constantly filled with wonder at the number of things that other people do without any evident difficulty that are pretty much beyond me.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away

People

“We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”

Maggie O'Farrell (1972) British writer

Source: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

“Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Source: Invisible Monsters

Time

“She watched the gap between ship and shore grow to a huge gulf. Perhaps this was a little like dying, the departed no longer visible to the others, yet both still existed, only in different worlds.”

Susan Wiggs (1958) American writer

Source: The Charm School

“But happiness is being able to hope, however faintly, for happiness. So, at least, we must believe if we are to live in the world of today.”

Osamu Dazai (1909–1948) Japanese author

Source: Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy

Happiness, Hope

“I'm allergic to family occasions. Sometimes I think we'd do better as dandelion seeds-no family, no history, just floating off into the world, each on our own piece of fluff.”

Sophie Kinsella book Twenties Girl

Source: Twenties Girl

Family, History, Thinking

“I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Source: The Story of My Life: With Her Letters (1887 1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education Including Passages from the Reports and Letters of Her Teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan by John Albert Macy

Life, Soul, Sense

“The hollowness was in his arms and the world was snowing.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

“The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Variant: I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth--then shut up.
Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

Truth, Lie, Way, Time

“The world is turning into a cesspool of imbeciles.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

“What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.”

Mary Karr (1955) American writer

Source: Lit

Youth, Stupidity, Hope, Hurt

“Ghosts are memories, and we carry them because those we love do not leave the world”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Love, Memory

“We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.”

Lynda Barry (1956) Cartoonist

Reality

“I've seen men die because they were sure that what should not happen, would not.
-Robert Jordan(The eye of the world, Wheel of time)”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Men, Time

“At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 18.

Fate, Lie

“Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

“The world is only as fair as you can make it. Takes a lot of fight. A lot of fight. But if you stay in here, in your little cave, that's one less fighter on the side of fair.”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

Source: Beauty Queens

Fight

“The guy stroked his goatee. "What do you call twenty guys watching the world series?"
"The New York Yankees," Butch replied.”

Jessica Bird book Dark Lover

Source: Dark Lover

Guy

“Dare to believe in the reality of your assumption
and watch the world play its part
relative to to its fulfillment.”

Neville Goddard (1905–1972) American author and lecturer

Reality, Parting

“I don't have the heart to tell him that's the wrong way to think about the world. There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Way, Question, Thinking, Heart

“Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

“Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Personal Talk, sonnet 3 (1806).

Happiness, Books, Dreams, Strong

“I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us.”

John Guare Six Degrees of Separation

Source: Six Degrees of Separation

Imagination

“But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.”

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) American sociologist, historian, activist and writer

Beauty, Art, Music, Color

“There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.”

Charlie Kaufman (1958) American screenwriter

Source: Adaptation.: The Shooting Script

People, Idea, Passion

“I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I am old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless.”

Dean Koontz Odd Thomas

Source: Odd Thomas

Communication

“They tell us that Suicide is the greatest piece of Cowardice… That Suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Life, Suicide, Personality

“my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

Sense

“She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.”

Michael Cunningham book The Hours

Source: The Hours

Books, Feeling

“We're none of us quite so sure of our place in the world that we can't be rocked off our feet by bad times. It's the getting back up again that counts. Not that you fall, but getting back up again counts for more in the long run.”

Mercedes Lackey (1950) American novelist and short story writer

Source: Intrigues

Time

“Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world.”

Robin Hobb book Fool's Fate

Source: Fool's Fate

Change

“The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.”

William Golding book Lord of the Flies

Source: Lord of the Flies

Law, Understanding

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walking

Source: Walking (June 1862)

“You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it'll stick its head out and say 'Hi.' You don't seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Thinking

“Even as she'd been writing it, she wondered if she was using too many exclamation marks, but she was glad she left them in. Nothing says "all is good in the world" like exclamation marks, after all.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Kingdom of the Wicked

“Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.”

Helder Camara (1909–1999) Brazilian Catholic priest, archbishop of Olinda and Recife

Source: Spiral Of Violence

Love, Men

“The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.”

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

Sleep

“Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Imagination, Knowledge, Inspirational

“Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.”

Carolyn See (1934–2016) American writer

Change

“There's nothing more aggravating in the world than the midnight sniffling of the person you've decided to hate.”

Shannon Hale book Book of a Thousand Days

Source: Book of a Thousand Days

Hate, Personality

“What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Dreams

“My thoughts create my world -Marcus Flutie”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Variant: My thoughts create my world.
Source: Sloppy Firsts

“I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 11
Essais (1595), Book III

“I disconnect the telephone to keep the outside world in it's correct place.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Tell-All

Source: Tell-All

“Think positive girl, or the world ends.”

Rick Riordan book The Throne of Fire

Source: The Throne of Fire

Girl, Thinking

“I'm steel-toed boots in a ballet-slipper world.”

Richard Kadrey (1957) San Francisco-based novelist, freelance writer, and photographer

Source: Sandman Slim

“For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye….”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Tom, Scene Seven
Source: The Glass Menagerie (1944)
Context: Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger — anything that can blow your candles out! — for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles Laura — and so goodbye…

“Everybody in the world is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn't depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.”

Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People

Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People

Happiness, Way, Dependency

“In that moment, the machinery of the world lined up. Somewhere a clock struck midnight, and Hugo's future seemed to fall perfectly into place.”

Brian Selznick book The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Source: The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Future

“Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.”

Tony Kushner The Illusion

Source: The Illusion

Love

“I'm King Of The World!!!”

James Cameron (1954) Canadian film director

Jack
Titanic (1997)
Variant: I'm the king of the world!
Source: James Cameron's Titanic

“I don't expect you to understand anything I'm telling you. But I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.”

William Saroyan book The Human Comedy

Source: The Human Comedy (1943)
Context: Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but every life shall one day end. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us. His body can be taken, but not him. You shall know your father better as you grow and know yourself better. He is not dead, because you are alive. Time and accident, illness and weariness took his body, but already you have given it back to him, younger and more eager than ever. I don't expect you to understand anything I'm telling you. But I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.

Life, People, Understanding

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Books, Wealth

“If you could only love enough, you could be the most powerful person in the world.”

Emmet Fox (1886–1951) American New Thought writer

Love, Personality

“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Upstream: Selected Essays

“Welcome to the wonderful world of jealousy, he thought. For the price of admission, you get a splitting headache, a nearly irresistable urge to commit murder, and an inferiority complex. Yippee.”

Jessica Bird book Dark Lover

Source: Dark Lover

Jealousy

“I hope if there is another world, we will not be judged too harshly for the things we did wrong here—that we will at least be forgiven for the mistakes we made out of love.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Source: 20th Century Ghosts

Love, Hope

“Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world
acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom.”

Patrick Califia-Rice (1954) American writer

Variant: Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom.

Wisdom, Women, Truth

“Only in a world where faith is difficult can faith exist.”

Lee Strobel (1952) American writer

Source: The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity

Faith

“You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it's not true. Generally, people don't like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

People, Feeling

“Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn't get to have.”

Ann Brashares book Sisterhood Everlasting

Source: Sisterhood Everlasting

Life, Beauty, Universe, Water

“Calvin's Dad: It's going to be a grim day when the world is run by a generation that doesn't know anything but what it's seen on TV.
p100”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Something Under the Bed Is Drooling
Source: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“Each the others world entire.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

“It’s not when you start that makes your success in the world, but when you quit.”

Richard Bach book Nothing by Chance

Source: Nothing by Chance

Success

“Man is estranged from what he essentially is. His existence in a transitory world contradicts his essential participation in the eternal world of ideas.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 127
Source: Systematic Theology, Vol 2: Existence and the Christ
Context: Plato … teaches the separation of the human soul from its “home” in the realm of pure essences. Man is estranged from what he essentially is. His existence in a transitory world contradicts his essential participation in the eternal world of ideas.

Idea

“This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words! You can find friends between the pages of a book, wonderful friends.”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkspell

Books, Help

“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Attributed to Milton at http://quotationsbook.com/quote/31964/#sthash.zAJjMqmY.dpbs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverence_(emotion)#Quotations, great-quotes.com, and brainyquote.com. Spirituality author Sarah Ban Breathnach writes, in her 1996 Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude: "Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life (is it abundant or is it lacking?) and the world (is it friendly or is it hostile?)." A Milton quotation occurs on the same page. Misattributed

Life, Change, Gratitude

“… there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Life

“I guess I don't really understand you yet,' I said. 'I'm not all that smart. It takes me a while to understand things. But if I do have time, I will come to understand you -- better than anyone else in the world ever can.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Understanding, Time

“The secret and the sacred are sisters. When the secret is not respected, the sacred vanishes. Consequently, reflection should not shine too severe or aggressive a light on the world of the soul.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Secret, Soul, Sister, Light

“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Source: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Chapter XXIV: Conclusion
Context: Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: — "Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!"

“Through my curtains I can see a big yellow moon. I’m thinking of all the people in the world who will be looking at that same moon.

I wonder how many of them haven’t got any eyebrows?”

Louise Rennison book Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging

Source: Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging

People, Thinking

“In a world where you are constantly asked to be 'committed,' it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.”

Tom Hodgkinson (1968) British writer

Source: The Freedom Manifesto

“This world has need of song and sword.”

Patricia Briggs (1965) American writer

Source: Dragon Bones

“He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.”

Cheryl Strayed book Torch

Source: Torch

Memory

“The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.”

Alan Lightman book Einstein's Dreams

Source: Einstein's Dreams

Life, Past

“Together in our house, in the firelight, we are the world made small.”

Jennifer Donnelly book Revolution

Source: Revolution

Housing

“You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

“Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times ALREADY – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

As quoted in Quit Your Day Job!: How to Sleep Late, Do What You Enjoy, and Make a Ton of ... (2004) by James D. Denney, p. 124 https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1884956041

Time, Loneliness

“There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Books, Reading, Drawing

“I will not let the non-knitters of the world decide how normal I am.”

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (1968) Canadian writer

“I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.”

Ford Madox Ford book The Good Soldier

Source: The Good Soldier

Men, Heart

“Mrs. Daugherty was keeping my bowl of cream of wheat hot, and she had a special treat with it, she said. It was bananas.

In the whole story of the world, bananas have never once been a special treat.”

Gary D. Schmidt book Okay for Now

Source: Okay for Now

“All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.”

Marya Hornbacher (1974) American journalist

Understanding

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

John Muir book Our National Parks

The Cruise of the Corwin http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/cruise_of_the_corwin/default.aspx (1917), chapter 3: Siberian Adventures  (Echoing William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, iii, 3: "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.") 1910s Variant: One touch of nature makes all the world kin. Source: Our National Parks

Nature, Beauty, Peaceful