Quotes about spacing
page 5

“This whole earth in which we inhabit is but a point is space.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

“There is no remedy for death--or birth--except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.”

Jim Crace book Being Dead

Source: Being Dead

Death, Birth

“She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.”

Sarah Waters The Night Watch

Source: The Night Watch

Housing

“The cemetery is an open space among the ruins covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

Preface
Source: Adonais (1821)

Love, Death, Thinking, Winter

“Built to be lonely
to love the absent.
Find me
Free me
from this
corrosive doubt
futile despair
horror in repose.
I can fill my space
fill my time
but nothing can fill this void in my heart.”

Sarah Kane book 4.48 Psychosis

Source: 4.48 Psychosis

Love, Time, Heart, Despair

“There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacings of the spheres.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

As quoted in the preface of the book entitled Music of the Spheres by Guy Murchie (1961)
The Golden Verses

Music, Powerful

“She closed her hands around his and shut her eyes, imagining their bed cut free of this strange prison, floating through space or on the surface of the ocean, just the two of them alone.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Imagination

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

People, Freedom

“There is an empty space next to you in the backseat of the station wagon. Make it the shape of everything you need. Now say hello.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

Source: Crush

“… and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.”

Kim Edwards book The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Source: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Life, Happiness, Suffering, Future

“what was fang going to do BLOG about max throwing herself into space so she wouldn't have to kiss him again? NO instead he smashed his fist against the cave wall then grimaced at the pain and stupidity seeing his bloodied knuckles”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

Pain, Stupidity, Kiss

“By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos

Universe, Time

“Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opes a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space.”

Melvin Burgess (1954) British children's writer

Source: Smack

Time, Personality

“The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

"The Destructive Character" Frankfurter Zeitung (20 November 1931)
Source: Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings

“Ryoji: It's either that she doesn't know how to lean on someone or she's simply that selfless. She won't give me a space to worry about her. Beyond that, she'll protect others instinctively.”

Bisco Hatori (1975) Japanese manga artist

Source: Ouran High School Host Club, Vol. 4

“It would require a singularly stupid man to go hang around in narrow tunnels and cramped spaces alongside a threat like that.

"And I, Harry Dresden, am that man," I stated.”

Jim Butcher book Ghost Story

Source: Ghost Story

Stupidity

“He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?”

Richard Brautigan book An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey

Page 15
An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey

Perfection

“Love can come when you're already who you are, when you're filled with you. Not when you look to someone else to fill the empty space.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

Love

“You could give us a hand instead of staring into space like a constipated camel," Terry Tarsal rudley broke into Marcia's spinning thoughts.”

Angie Sage book Queste

Source: Queste

“She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Happiness, Sadness

“My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: The Library at Night

Books, Reading

“The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!”

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

As quoted by Arthur C. Clarke in "Meeting of the Minds : Buzz Aldrin Visits Arthur C. Clarke" by Andrew Chaikin (27 February 2001) http://web.archive.org/web/20010302082528/http://www.space.com/peopleinterviews/aldrin_clarke_010227.html

“Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Reality, Time

“He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

Source: All the Pretty Horses

World

“Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?”

D.T. Suzuki (1870–1966) Japanese author and philosopher

Source: Zen and Japanese Culture

Universe, Time, Tea

“He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Love, Tear, Silence, Loss

“Ah, Beloved. Of all the things I must bid farewell to, you are the most difficult to lose. Forgive me that I have avoided you. Better, perhaps, that we make a space between us and become accustomed to it before fate forces that upon us.”

Robin Hobb book Fool's Fate

Source: Fool's Fate

Fate, Forgiveness

“Faith is not Desire. Faith is Will. Desires are things that need to be satisfied, whereas Will is a force. Will changes the space around us,…”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: The Witch Of Portobello

Faith, Change

“Paintings are seldom guilty and often framed for crimes they did not commit. Some cover holes-holes in walls, holes in lives. Some make holes-in wallets, holes in hearts… in negative space.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

Heart, Painting

“A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

“There are people who have too much space between their ears, and given the time, do nothing but free fall forever inside their head. It's a spooky thing to be left alone inside an angry innerverse.”

James St. James (1966) American writer

People, Time

“When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

Source: The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

Travel, Time

“And we are put on this earth a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Love, Learning

“Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Lonliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best thing you can do it know yourself… know what you want.”

Janet Fitch (1955) American writer

“A friend of mine once sent me a post card with a picture of the entire planet Earth taken from space. On the back it said, 'Wish you were here.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

People

“Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.”

Helen Keller book The Story of My Life

Source: The Story of My Life

“Bruises mapped my body from bumping into tables and tripping over curbs while walking with a book in my hand, my eyes focused on the pages instead of the live space around me.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: You Know Where to Find Me

Books

“For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing. Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps, it was only an echo.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

People, Music, Singing, Time

“What four realms? (Amanda)
Time, space, earth, and dreams. (Talon)
Okay, now that is scary. Some of you guys walk through time? (Amanda)
And space and dreams. (Talon)
Ah. So Rod Sterling was a Were-Hunter? (Amanda)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Night Pleasures

Source: Night Pleasures

Dreams, Guy, Time

“Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space…”

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist

Life, Books, Time

“Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought — particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.”

Woody Allen book Side Effects

"The UFO Menace".
Side Effects (1980)

People

“Rocks are space, and space is illusion.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“There has to be a middle. Without it, nothing can ever truly be whole. Because it is not just the space between, but also what holds everything together.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

“There's only so much room in one heart. You can fill it up with love or you can fill it with resentment. But every bit of resentment you hold takes space away from the love. And the resentment don't do no good noway, but look what love can do.”

Sheri Reynolds book The Rapture of Canaan

Source: The Rapture of Canaan

Love, Heart

“Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Children, People, Age

“What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.”

Richard Ford The Sportswriter

Source: The Sportswriter

Life, Time

“But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: The Library at Night

Books, World, Night

“You can't discuss the ocean with a well frog - he's limited by the space he lives in. You can't discuss ice with a summer insect - he's bound to a single season.”

Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher

Source: The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

Summer, Season

“They said you can't go to the moon. They said you can't put cheese inside a pizza crust, but NASA did it. They had to, because the cheese kept floating off in space.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

“You mean old books?"

"Stories written before space travel but about space travel."

"How could there have been stories about space travel before --"

"The writers," Pris said, "made it up.”

Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Books, Travel

“I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. It didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women (1978)
Context: I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn't fit the other. I didn't care.

Personality

“What would killing the Elders result in?"
"Panic? Fear? Three empty parking spaces in the Sanctuary?”

Derek Landy Skulduggery Pleasant

Source: Skulduggery Pleasant

Fear

“Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Books, Home, Sense, Time

“And Vishous… V was the worst of them. He stood by the door, staring into space. Icy before, he was glacial now, a sinkhole in the room.

-Phury's thoughts”

Jessica Bird book Lover Unbound

Source: Lover Unbound

“Knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space.”

Mark Z. Danielewski book House of Leaves

Source: House of Leaves

Knowledge, Water, Time

“I know the place.
It is true.
Everything we do
Corrects the space
Between death and me
And you.”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

Death

“The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

Hope, Way, Forgetting

“I am this space my body believes in.”

Yusef Komunyakaa (1947) American writer

Source: Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems

“If it works out, it's the best thing in the world. If it doesn't work out, it's like having your heart torn out and chopped up into little pieces while you watch. It leaves a big hollow space that never really heals.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Narcissus in Chains

Source: Narcissus in Chains

World, Heart

“You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.”

Celeste Ng book Everything I Never Told You: A Novel

Source: Everything I Never Told You

Love, Children, Hope

“The one I wore to kill Jabba (my favorite moment in my own personal film history), which I highly recommend your doing: find an equivalent of killing a giant space slug in your head and celebrate that.”

Carrie Fisher book The Princess Diarist

Source: The Princess Diarist

History, Personality

“I took his wildness from him and tried to fold it into myself, filling up the empty spaces all those second place finishes left behind.”

Sarah Dessen book Dreamland

Source: Dreamland (2000)

“Join us next time for Days of the Undead when Rachel learns her long lost brother is really a crown prince from outer space.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Every Which Way But Dead

Learning, Time

“These houses had been plunked down with an alarming randomness -- unevenly spaced, on crooked lines, like whoever had designed the place had said, "We'll just follow this cat, and wherever he sits down, we'll build something.”

Maureen Johnson book Let It Snow

Source: Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

Cats, Housing

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

World, Reading, Past, Future

“History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

History, Idea, Nature, Time

“Above us our palace waits, the only one I've ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming again like fireflies in a summer evening.”

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1956) novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist

Source: The Palace of Illusions

Waiting, Summer

“I couldn't help it. I tried to keep it down but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces. It was a message more than a feeling, a message that tolled like a bell: change, change, change.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Feeling, Change, Help

“The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?”

Amy Hempel (1951) Short story writer

Source: The Collected Stories

Thinking

“When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.”

Mark Strand (1934–2014) Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

"Keeping Things Whole" (1969)
Source: Selected Poems
Context: p>In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.</p

Parting

“If only there was enough space on this tiny card to evoke my unfettered joie de vivre for what you have done. The gaiety, the mirth, the heavenly bubbling of every effusive cell that sings inside me for your kind and pithy offering.”

Joshua Braff (1967) American writer

Source: The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green

Singing

“Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Pain

“I wasn't a misanthrope and I wasn't a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Drink

“You occupied my space. But because you were not in my present, when I looked into my future I saw… nothing. Isn't that sad? And stupid?”

Jerry Spinelli book Love, Stargirl

Source: Love, Stargirl

Stupidity, Sadness, Future

“Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson book The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist

Source: The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist

“I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

“As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space
an illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble
a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning
view all created things like this.”

Red Pine (1943) American author, poet, and translator of poetry

Source: The Diamond Sutra

Dreams, Star

“I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

Sense, Time

“Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.”

Gaston Bachelard book The Poetics of Space

Source: The Poetics of Space

Tree

“NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

World, Anger

“Learning to stop sweating the small stuff involves deciding what things to engage in and what things to ignore. From a certain perspective, life can be described as a series of mistakes, one right after another with a little space in between.”

Richard Carlson (1961–2006) Author, psychotherapist and motivational speaker

Life, Learning

“You’re presumptuous and arrogant and a whole lot of other things if you think I’ve changed my mind.”
“You see, that’s just it.” There he was again, moving into my space. “I think you like the ‘other things.”

Richelle Mead book The Indigo Spell

Source: The Indigo Spell

Thinking, Change

“Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: The Library at Night

Books

“The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Star, Sun

“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

Time

“Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Vanishing Acts

People, Soul, Memory, Heart

“As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.”

Will Shortz (1952) American puzzle creator and editor

Nature

“It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Feeling, Understanding, Training

“He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better.”

Charles Frazier book Cold Mountain

Source: Cold Mountain

World

“Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 53
Context: Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects. We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.

Fear, Universe, Time

“If you touch me like that again, Evangeline,” he began in a husky tone, dropping to his seat once more, “in the space of a heartbeat, I will have you off this bike and onto the closest horizontal surface. And I woan be picky, no.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Poison Princess

“We all want to break our orbits, float like a satellite gone wild in space, run the risk of disintegration. We all want to take our lives in our own hands and hurl them out among the stars.”

David Bottoms (1949) American writer

Star

“You could give us a hand instead of staring into space like a constipated camel.”

Angie Sage book Queste

Source: Queste