
„Sometimes, that mountain you've been climbing, is just a grain of sand.“
— Carrie Underwood American country music singer 1983
From her hit single, So Small from the album, Carnival Ride (2007).
"View with a Grain of Sand"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The People on the Bridge (1986)
Context: We call it a grain of sand
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect or apt.
„Sometimes, that mountain you've been climbing, is just a grain of sand.“
— Carrie Underwood American country music singer 1983
From her hit single, So Small from the album, Carnival Ride (2007).
„The divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand; there I represented it in the reeds.“
— Caspar David Friedrich Swedish painter 1774 - 1840
Quote of Friedrich on his painting Swans in the Rushes (c. 1820), as cited in "Absent Presences in Liminal Places: Murnau's Nosferatu and the Otherworld of Stoker's Dracula" by Saviour Catania in Literature Film Quarterly (2004) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200401/ai_n9377557/print
1794 - 1840
— Peter J. Carroll British occultist 1953
Source: The Apophenion (2008), p. 11; this makes reference to William Blake's Auguries of Innocence: "To see the world in a grain of sand…"
„it wasn't the mountain ahead that wears you out, but the grain of sand in your shoe“
— Karen White American writer 1964
Source: The Beach Trees
„Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth.“
— Carl Sagan American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator 1934 - 1996
54 min 55 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Journeys in Space and Time [Episode 8]
Context: Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity we could plunge our world into a time of darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet.
„When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.“
— John Cheever American novelist and short story writer 1912 - 1982
The Late Forties and the Fifties, 1952 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)
„Jews are likened to sand: tiny grains, dry and scattered, each separate from the other.“
— Isaac Leib Peretz Yiddish language author and playwright 1852 - 1915
Reb Nohemkes Myses, 1904, p. 200.
— Bob Dylan American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist 1941
Song lyrics, Shot of Love (1981), Every Grain Of Sand
— Bob Dylan American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist 1941
Song lyrics, Shot of Love (1981), Every Grain Of Sand
Variant: "I am hanging in the balance of a perfect, finished plan" (The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3)
— William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Variant: To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
Source: 1800s, Auguries of Innocence (1803), Line 1
— Henrik Ibsen Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet 1828 - 1906
Mrs. Alving, Act II
Ghosts (1881)
Context: I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.
„Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.“
— William Goldman, book The Princess Bride
Source: The Princess Bride
— Robert M. Pirsig, book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
— Jeffrey H. Schwartz American anthropologist 1948
What the Bones Tell Us (1997)
— Malcolm Bradbury English author and academic 1932 - 2000
Page 150.
Stepping Westward (1965)