Quotes about the world
page 59

“This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“there are three kinds of people in the world: those who don't know and don't know they don't know; those who don't know and do know they don't know; and those who know and know how much they still don't know.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Bloodfever

People

“I do regard her as one who is too modest for the world in general to be aware of half her accomplishments, and too highly accomplished for modesty to be natural of any other woman.”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

Nature

“Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?”

Yukio Mishima book Confessions of a Mask

Source: Confessions of a Mask (1949), p. 208.
Context: I received an impassioned letter from Sonoko. There was no doubt that she was truly in love. I felt jealous. Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?

Love, Jealousy, Feeling

“Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

“The greatest gift is the passion for reading.
It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,
it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.
It is a moral illumination.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

Knowledge, Passion, Reading

“Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

Source: Babette's Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny

Chance, Heart, Cry

“Many of us have made our world so familiar that we do not see it anymore. An interesting question to ask yourself at night is, What did I really see this day?”

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

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Question, Night

“Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.”

Yōko Ogawa book The Housekeeper and the Professor

Source: The Housekeeper and the Professor

Way

“Birds sing even when the world is filled with sadness. I don't know why people can't do the same thing.”

Michael Gilbert (1912–2006) Author

Source: Perfected Sinfulness

People, Sadness, Bird, Singing

“Zealots: Wild eyed persons afflicted with incurable certainty about the workings of the world, a certainty that can lead to violence when the world doesn't fit.”

Jonathan Stroud book The Ring of Solomon

Source: The Ring of Solomon

Affliction, Personality

“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.”

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet

“I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.”

Justina Chen (1968) American writer

Beauty

“If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.”

Richard Dawkins book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

History, Thinking

“Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.”

Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856–1923) American writer

Life, Beauty, Star, Sister

“Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.”

Lev Grossman The Magicians

Source: The Magicians

People, Dead

“A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.”

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) English crime writer, playwright, essayist and Christian writer

Essays, Are Women Human? (1938)

“I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

Dreams, Hope, Learning

“I'm on such a dangerous road, Milena. You're standing firmly near a tree, young, beautiful, your eyes subduing with their radiance the suffering world.”

Franz Kafka book Letters to Milena

Source: Letters to Milena

Beauty, Tree, Suffering

“I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have shared my kingdom with you.”

Anaïs Nin book House of Incest

Source: House of Incest

Understanding

“All around the world, we are gazing skyward waiting for God…
Never realizing that God is waiting for us.”

Dan Brown (1964) American author

God, Waiting

“In fact I was fairly certain there was no one in the entire world quite like Adrian Ivashkov.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

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

Thinking, Change, Deep

“After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.”

Richard Russo Empire Falls

Source: Empire Falls

People, Time, Heart

“But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Music, Star, Flowers, Kiss

“The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.”

Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Men, Behavior, Nature, Change

“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

“Mama says that satisfaction isn't what I should search for. Respect is. Respect?
I detest that word. Probably because in this world you have to respect the wrong people for the wrong reasons.”

Melina Marchetta book Looking for Alibrandi

Source: Looking for Alibrandi

People, Search

“Bugger this. I want a better world.”

Warren Ellis (1968) English comics and fiction writer

Source: The Authority, Vol. 2: Under New Management

“Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?”

Margaret Atwood book The Year of the Flood

Source: The Year of the Flood

Beauty, Feeling

“Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Love

“Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Jayber Crow

People

“Jason decided there was nothing in the world scarier than a gang of bat-wielding grannies.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

“Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Men

“Think about yourself at least once in your life otherwise you may miss the best comedy in this world.”

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) British comic actor and filmmaker

Life, Thinking

“There are such repulsive faces in the world.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

“I gave him my best cryptic smile. He did not fall down to his feet, kiss my shoes, and promise me the world. I must be getting rusty.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bites

Smile, Shoe, Kiss

“Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Suffering

“Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.”

John Banville The Sea

Source: The Sea

God

“The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.”

Thomas Ligotti book Songs of a Dead Dreamer

Source: Songs of a Dead Dreamer

Time

“She couldn't survey the wreck of the world with an air of casual unconcern.”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

“Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Death

“When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become logjammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Love, Effort, Personality

“To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.”

Martin Buber book I and Thou

Source: I and Thou

God, Help

“Rene looked at Grendel. “What in the world is that?”
“That’s our mutant attack poodle,” I told her.
“Is he chewing on a gun?”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Slays

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”

Tom Stoppard The Real Thing

Henry, Act II, scene V
Source: The Real Thing (1982)

Children, Thinking, Dead

“Now is a time for change, a time to become the greatest version of yourself. And a time to to make your grandest vision of the world.”

Ilchi Lee (1950) South Korean businessman

Change, Time

“There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.”

Marilynne Robinson Gilead

Source: Gilead

Beauty, Feeling

“Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.”

D.H. Lawrence book Women in Love

Source: Women in Love

“You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.”

Stewart O'Nan (1961) American writer

Source: The Odds: A Love Story

Love, Life, Parting, Personality

“Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.”

Paul Fussell (1924–2012) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Source: Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

People, Universe

“What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Fear, Dreams, Night

“Example moves the world more than doctrine.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

“It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

Color

“When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

Source: Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic

Understanding

“The entire world is a collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Source: Wuthering Heights

“There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.”

Charlie Kaufman (1958) American screenwriter

Source: Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script

People

“God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

God

“Just in case the world ends tomorrow," she said. "We might as well enjoy today.”

Susan Beth Pfeffer (1948) American writer

“I’m the god of funerals. I know every death custom in the world—how to die properly, how to prepare the body and soul for the afterlife. I live for death.”
“You must be fun at parties,” I said.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Death, God, Soul

“It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.”

E.L. Doctorow Ragtime

Source: Ragtime

“In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were "fine" or "industrial" or "minor". It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being.”

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (1933) Iranian philosopher

Source: A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World

Art, Soul

“I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers," from The Weary Blues (1926)

Soul

“The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Motivational, Back To Work

“He'd burn the whole world down til he could dig out you of the ashes.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

Books, Reading

“Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

Source: Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

Hope, Change, Reading, Heart

“A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

People, Color, Light, Change

“Despereaux," she whispered.
And then she shouted it, "Despereaux!"
Reader, nothing is sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name.
Nothing.”

Kate DiCamillo book The Tale of Despereaux

Source: The Tale of Despereaux

Love, Sadness

“As though all the world were a bad joke and she was the only one around who knew the punchline.”

Jack Ketchum The Girl Next Door

Source: The Girl Next Door

“For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism - either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. The last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.”

John Steinbeck book Cannery Row

Source: Cannery Row

“He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and every body hoped that he would never come there again.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Hope

“In a world of sorrow, love was an act of will. All you needed were the right ingredients.”

Alice Hoffman The Story Sisters

Source: The Story Sisters

Love

“On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Men

“We will K‘Vruck the world.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

“She had to go on this quest. The fate of the world might depend on it. But part of him wanted to say: Forget the world. He didn’t want to be without her.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Fate, Parting, Dependency, Forgetting

“If I can learn to understand this language without words, I can learn to understand the world.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Understanding, Learning

“In medieval times, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called, a 'dangerous form of spiritual alienation' -- a devaluing of the world and its creator.”

Richard Louv (1949) American journalist

Time, Personality

“The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Life

“She had never asked herself whether it cost him any effort. Any effort to stand between Will and the world, protecting each one of them from the other.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Effort

“That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You’re both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Book of Tomorrow

Dreams

“I was thanking him for… well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

“If we commit ourselves to reading thus increasing our knowledge, only God limits how far we can go in this world.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

God, Knowledge, Reading

“As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.”

Marisha Pessl (1977) American writer

Source: Night Film

People, Truth, Peace, Appearance

“The truth is, the world isn't easy for any of us. It never has been and it never will be.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Best of Me

Source: The Best of Me

Truth

“I am anything I wish to be. The world cannot choose for me. No, it is for me to choose what the world shall be.”

Frances Hardinge (1973) British children's writer

Source: The Lost Conspiracy

“The world isn't fair, Calvin."
"I know Dad, but why isn't it ever unfair in my favor?”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

The Essential Calvin and Hobbes
Source: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury

“What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Thinking, Parting

“The world has been abnormal for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.”

Madeleine L'Engle A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Source: A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Peace, Home, Heart

“There are 3 reasons for why you can't beat me. First, I'm better looking than you are. Second, your blows are too light. And third, there's nothing in the world I can't tear up.”

Akimine Kamijyo (1975) Japanese manga artist

Source: Samurai Deeper Kyo, Volume 03

Tear, Light

“A world without you is unknown to me. I don't even know if it exists.”

Kyōichi Katayama (1959) Japanese writer

Source: Socrates In Love

“The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.”

André Bazin (1918–1958) French film critic

“Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?"

"Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.”

Roger Zelazny Lord of Light

Source: Lord of Light

Sea

“I have always been a romantic; one of those who believes that a woman in pink circus tights holds all the secrets of the world.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

Secret

“I begin with the young. We older ones are used up but my magnificent youngsters! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world? Look at all these men and boys! What material! With you and I, we can make a new world.”

Adolf Hitler book Hitler's Letters and Notes

Adolf Hitler c. 1933; as quoted in Hitler Speaks http://books.google.com/books?id=PndurCstDZMC&pg=PA251 (1939), by Hermann Rauschning, London: Thornton Butterworth, p. 247. <br class="br">Misattributed <br class="br">Source: Hitler's Letters and Notes <br class="br">Context: I am beginning with the young. We older ones are used up. Yes, we are old already. We are rotten to the marrow. We have no unrestrained instincts left. We are cowardly and sentimental. We are bearing the burden of a humiliating past, and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world? Look at these young men and boys! What material! With them, I can make a new world.

Men, Boy