Quotes about the world
page 60

“One step at a time, I can walk around the world. Watch me.”

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)

“But still," Ayumi said, "it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness."
"You may be right," Aomame said, "But it's too late to trade it in for another one.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

“Mama was crying, and the rain made it seem as if the whole world was crying.”

Lois Lowry book Number the Stars

Source: Number the Stars

Cry

“The world cracks open for those willing to take a risk.”

Frances Mayes (1940) American university professor and writer

Source: A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller

“… some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Michael Caine movie The Dark Knight

Movie The Dark Knight, character Alfred Pennyworth

Men, Money

“The most beautiful world is always entered through imagination.”

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

Beauty, Imagination

“He sighed and then focused his eyes right on me. It was like drowning, drowning in seas of green. There was nothing in the world except for those eyes.
"I want to kiss you, Rose," he said softly. "And I want you to want me too.”

Richelle Mead Shadow Kiss

Source: Shadow Kiss

Kiss, Sea

“But he can also be incredibly sweet. And I know that, deep down, I mean the world to him." "Deep down? That sounds like settling to me. You shouldn't have to venture deep down in order to get to love.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Love

“the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.”

Jasper Fforde book One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

Source: One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

Books

“She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.”

Douglas Adams book Mostly Harmless

Source: Mostly Harmless

Secret, Intelligence, Understanding, Dead

“there is nothing bad to fear; once you have crossed that threshold, all is well. Another world, and you do not have to speak”

Franz Kafka Letter to His Father

Source: Letter to His Father

Fear

“I would rather have your friendship than the love of any other woman in the world!”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XII : A Tête-à-tête and a Discovery; Gilbert to Helen
Context: You couldn't have given me less encouragement, or treated me with greater severity than you did! And if you think you have wronged me by giving me your friendship, and occasionally admitting to me to the enjoyment of your company and conversation, when all hopes of close intimacy were vain — as indeed you always gave me to understand — if you think you have wronged me by this, you are mistaken; for such favours, in themselves alone, are not only delightful to my heart, but purifying, exalting, ennobling to my soul; and I would rather have your friendship than the love of any other woman in the world!

Love, Friendship

“People could bear so much, but Simon did not know how much of the original you was left when the world had twisted you into a whole different shape.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Bitter of Tongue

People

“I dreamed of a green place once,” he whispered. “A manor house and a little girl with red hair, and preparations for a wedding. If there are other worlds, then maybe there is one where I was a good brother and a good son.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Dreams, Girl, Wedding, Housing

“One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

“He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.”

Henry Miller book Sexus

Context: A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in....

The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus (1949), Chapter 1. (New York: Grove Press, c1965, p. 17-18)

“We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Time

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960) <br class="br">Source: The Sound of Mountain Water

People, Health, Books, Nature

“For once, you're going to hear something that doesn't fit into your neat, compartmentalized world of order and logic and reason.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

“The doors of the world are opened to people who can read.”

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

People, Reading

“They walked back into the world together, wearing the gift that had been given them: just life. Pity was not love, Barbie reflected… but if you were a child, giving clothes to someone who was naked had to be a step in the right direction.”

Stephen King book Under the Dome

Source: Under the Dome

Love, Life, Clothes

“Everything feels right with the world…
… and the sad thing is that I know it's a dream. I know it must soon end, and when it does I will be thrust awake into a place where either I'm broken, or the world is broken.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: Challenger Deep

Sadness, Dreams, Feeling

“I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.”

Haruki Murakami book A Wild Sheep Chase

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase

“The mad rarely know that they are mad. It's the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them.”

Jim Butcher (1971) American author

Thinking, Madness

“None of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you take towards them.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Evil

“I was glad I wasn’t in love, that I wasn’t happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women (1978)
Context: I was glad I wasn't in love, that I wasn't happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.

Love, Happiness, People, Sense

“The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.”

Sherman Alexie (1966) Native American author and filmmaker

Parting

“The soul is like an uninhabited world
that comes to life only when
God lays His head
against us.”

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

Life, God, Soul

“There is nothing special in the world. nothing magic. just physics.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Diary

Source: Diary

“Part of her revolted against the insanity of the rules. Part of her was grateful. In a world of chaos, any guidelines helped. And she knew that each day she remained alive,. One plus one plus one. The Devil's arithmetic…”

Jane Yolen (1939) American speculative fiction and children's writer

Help, Parting

“It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.”

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer

Source: Beowulf

Death, Waiting

“It’s better for the whole world to know you, even as a sex star, than never to be known at all.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Sex, Star

“There could never be innocence in a world without justice.”

Tim Bowler book Frozen Fire

Source: Frozen Fire

Justice

“I am as I am. The world is as it is. Whether I am content with that has very little to do with it.”

William Nicholson (1948) British screenwriter, playwright and novelist

“We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Source: In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison

Way

“Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.”

Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846–1916) American writer

Love, Season, Christmas

“The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Source: The Complete Essays

Question, Parting

“The world is not that black and white, Rachel. There are no moral absolutes. It is complex.”

Emily Giffin Something Borrowed

Source: Something Borrowed

“how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

“A Half-Blood of the eldest gods, Shall reach sixteen against all odds
And see the world in endless sleep
The Hero's soul, cursed blade shall reap
A single choice shall end his days
Olympus to preserve or raze.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

God, Soul, Sleep

“My books promised me that life wasn’t just made up of workday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that.”

Laura Amy Schlitz (1955) children's author

Life, Books, Color

“Ocean, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

Water

“The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want”

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

“Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.”

Harry Crews (1935–2012) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Source: Blood and Grits

“We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.”

Patti Smith Just Kids

Source: Just Kids

“because the past was always around her and might return at any time. It prowled the world searching for her, and she knew it was growing angrier at every passing day.”

Nicholas Sparks book Safe Haven

Source: Safe Haven

Search, Time, Past

“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”

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

Source: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.”

Richard K. Morgan book Broken Angels

Source: Broken Angels

“Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett A Little Princess

Source: A Little Princess

Understanding

“That's the funny thing about old hurts- they just wait for new heartache to come along and then show up, just as sharp and horrible as the first day you woke up with the world changed all around you.”

Lilith Saintcrow book Strange Angels

Source: Strange Angels

Change, Waiting, Hurt, Heartbreaking

“your loved ones have been used to lure you into Kronos's traps. Your fatal flaw is personal loyalty Percy. You do not know when it is time to cut your losses. To save a friend you would sacrifice the world.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Love, Loss, Time, Personality

“The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.”

Hanif Kureishi (1954) English playwright, screenwriter, novelist

Source: The Word and the Bomb

“Unbelievable," I said. "First you wanted to hide her away to keep you alive. Now you actually want her out in the world to use her compulsion for your own psycho plans.”

Richelle Mead Shadow Kiss

Source: Shadow Kiss

“The world may need fixing, but it's worth preserving.”

Rick Riordan book The Throne of Fire

Source: The Throne of Fire

“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden (1952)
Context: When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
Context: In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

Death, Pleasure

“Don't believe in God. Love the world just the way it is.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

Love, God, Way

“… it was raining on Himmel Street when the world ended for Liesel Meminger.
The sky was dripping.
Like a tap that a child has tried its hardest to turn off but hasn’t quite managed.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

“Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.”

J.M. Coetzee book Disgrace

Source: Disgrace

Beauty, Parting

“The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Half of a Yellow Sun

Source: Half of a Yellow Sun

People

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

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

As quoted in "Doom and glory of knowing who you are" by Jane Howard, in LIFE magazine, Vol. 54, No. 21 (24 May 1963), p. 89 https://books.google.com/books?id=mEkEAAAAMBAJ; a part of this statement has often been quoted as it was paraphrased in The New York Times (1 June 1964): <br class="br">Context: You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.

Pain, People, History, Thinking

“My sister had taught me to look at the world that way, as a place that glitters, as a place where the calls of the crickets and the crows and the wind are everyday occurrences that also happen to be magic.”

Cynthia Kadohata book Kira-Kira

Source: Kira-Kira

Way, Sister

“to die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day. Every day was there to be lived or to mark one’s departure from this world.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Departure

“The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

Happiness, Hope, Light, Parting

“I read because I have to. It drives everything else from my mind. It lets me escape to find other world.”

Adeline Yen Mah (1937) Author and physician

Source: Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter

Reading

“There was nothing in this world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost.”

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

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

“A dog can never tell you what she knows from the
smells of the world, but you know, watching her,
that you know
almost nothing.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Dog Songs

Dogs

“… The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!”

Nicole Krauss (1974) American novelist

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

“The most educated person in the world now has to admit-- I shall not say confess-- that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Education, Personality

“I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.”

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

God, Imagination, Sense, Personality

“In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Rant

Source: Rant

People, Imagination

“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything good in the world.”

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

“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 19 (p. 613)

Thinking

“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Books

“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, the whole world would be vegetarian.”

Linda McCartney (1941–1998) American photographer

Source: Linda's Kitchen: Simple and Inspiring Recipes for Meals Without Meat

“There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding”

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

Secret

“What kind of assholes bring a kid into worlds like these?”

Brian K. Vaughan (1976) American screenwriter, comic book creator

Source: Saga, Vol. 1

“Instead of focusing on the world's problems, give your attention and energy to trust, love, abundance, education and peace.”

Rhonda Byrne book The Secret

Source: The Secret

Love, Education, Peace, Problem

“It hurts when they're gone. And it doesn't matter if it's slow or fast, whether it's a long drawn-out disease or an unexpected accident. When they're gone the world turns upside down and you're left holding on, trying not to fall off.”

Walter Mosley (1952) American writer

Source: Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

Disease, Hurt

“One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.”

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

Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

Life, Strong

“In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.”

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

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Parent

“He licked at her lips."We are going to have some amazing children. The best this world has ever seen.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Seduce the Darkness

Children

“You need a new hobby, Rachel. Something other than nasty little men with visions of world domination.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Pale Demon

Men

“To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

Life, Soul, Understanding

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”

James Baldwin book Nobody Knows My Name

Source: "Faulkner and Desegregation" in Partisan Review (Fall 1956); republished in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
Context: Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges.

Change, Loss

“if my whole world is going to crash down around me, then i am going to make the sound of the crashing”

David Levithan book Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson