Quotes about wonder
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“I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.”

Roger Zelazny The Courts of Chaos

Source: The Courts of Chaos

People

“Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.”

Reynolds Price (1933–2011) American writer

Life, World, Heart

“I wondered if she was trying to convey something to me, something she could not put into words - something prior to words that she could not grasp within herself and which therefore had no hope of ever turning into words.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Hope

“All those months of taking it for granted that Peeta thought I was wonderful are over. Finally, he can see me for who I really am. Violent. Distrustful. Manipulative. Deadly.
And I hate him for it.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Katniss (p. 232)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)

Hate

“I wonder how long it would take for anyone to notice if I just stopped talking.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

“You can run but you can't hide… but I can try. I feel air catch in my lungs and I get a cramp in my side and this pain, this wonderful physical pain that I can place, reminds me that after all I am still alive.”

Jodi Picoult book Songs of the Humpback Whale

Source: Songs of the Humpback Whale

Pain, Feeling

“I think it happens to everyone as they grow up. You find out who you are and what you want, and then you realize that people you've known forever don't see things the way you do. And so you keep the wonderful memories, but find yourself moving on. It's perfectly normal.”

Nicholas Sparks book True Believer

Jeremy Marsh, Chapter 7, p. 113
Variant: I think it happens to everyone as they grow up. You find out who you are and what you want, and then you realize that people you've known forever don't see things the way you do. And so you keep the wonderful memories, but find yourself moving on. It's perfectly normal.
Source: 2000s, True Believer (2005)

People, Way, Memory

“Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.”

Jo Walton book Among Others

Source: Among Others

Books, Heart

“Sometimes I worry that there’s not enough room in my brain for both my dreams and reality that I’m a hard drive with limited gigabytes and one day I won’t be able to maintain the firewall between them. I wonder if that’s what senility is.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

Dreams, Reality

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

People, Secret

“Ever wonder why the gods created man, Grom? I personally think that we're the original reality show. They were so effing bored that they created us just so that they could feel better about themselves”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Styxx

God, Feeling, Thinking, Reality

“I wonder if you can refuse to inherit the world.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

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

World

“For them, it was nothing but an ordinary day on an ordinary day on an ordinary weekend, but for her, there was something revelatory about the notion that wonderful moments like these existed.”

Nicholas Sparks book Safe Haven

Source: Safe Haven

“Garcia wondered why people with JESUS stickers on their bumper always drove twenty miles per hour under the speed limit. If God was my co-pilot, he thought, I'd be doing a hundred and twenty.”

Carl Hiaasen Strip Tease

Source: Strip Tease

God, People, Speed

“Lucern felt himself "She called my erections wonderful?"
Entienne just gaped, then raised a fist to knock on his brother's forehead as if it were a door "Hello! Earth calling Luc! She thinks it's rigor mortis.”

Lynsay Sands Canadian writer

Source: Single White Vampire

Thinking

“I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.

The day you die.”

Yasunari Kawabata book Beauty and Sadness

Source: Beauty and Sadness

Age, Business

“I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Heart

“We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.”

Arthur Machen (1863–1947) Welsh author and mystic

Source: The Terror

Life, Dreams, Star, Thinking

“The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Life, Happiness, Understanding

“Because today, I think I'm leaning on the side of wonder.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Quintana of Charyn

Thinking

“That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness-and life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same.”

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

Life, Sadness, Time

“We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.”

Pat Conroy book Beach Music

Source: Beach Music

Love

“Making a journey by night is more wonderful than anything in the world.”

Tove Jansson book Moominpappa at Sea

Source: Moominpappa at Sea

World, Night

“S wonderful! 'S marvelous!
That you should care for me!”

Ira Gershwin (1896–1983) American lyricist

“I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that the delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Feeling

“He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.”

Cormac McCarthy book Cities of the Plain

Source: Cities of the Plain

Life, Time

“Clary wondered what exactly peanut-fish-olive-tomato soup tasted like.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

Fish

“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content”

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

Variant: Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and i learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Silence, Learning, Happy

“How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvelous.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Feeling, Personality

“I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

Life, World, Way, Thinking

“I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist.”

Elizabeth Kostova book The Historian

Source: The Historian

Knowledge

“Fay had a spot of blood on the left side of her mouth and I took a wet cloth and wiped it off. Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love.”

Charles Bukowski book Post Office

Source: Post Office (1971)

Love, Women, Suffering, Clothes

“The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder.”

Douglas Coupland The Gum Thief

Source: The Gum Thief

World, Weather

“One question always leads to another question. Some things are better to wonder about.”

Christopher Pike (1954) American author Kevin Christopher McFadden

Source: Black Blood

Question

“Was life always like that? she wondered. A game of hide and seek in which you only occasionally found the person you wanted to be?”

Maud Hart Lovelace book Betsy and the Great World

Source: Betsy and the Great World

Life, Game, Personality

“Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.”

Dean Koontz Odd Thomas

Source: Odd Thomas

Childhood

“But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.”

Gabrielle Zevin (1977) American writer

Kiss

“Hannah: Life could be wonderful if people would leave you alone.”

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

To the barber, while being shaved by him.
The Great Dictator (1940)

Life, People

“This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

World, Feeling

“And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
I carry your heart [ i carry it in my heart ]”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Variant: i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)
Source: Selected Poems

Star, Heart

“She began to feel the sense of wonderful elation that always came to her when beauty took hold of her and made her forget her fears.”

Madeleine L'Engle book And Both Were Young

Source: And Both Were Young

Fear, Beauty, Feeling, Sense

“I wonder what becomes of lost opportunities? Perhaps our guardian angel gathers them up as we drop them, and will give them back to us in the beautiful sometime when we have grown wiser, and learned how to use them rightly.”

Helen Keller book The Story of My Life

Source: The Story of My Life

Beauty, Angels, Learning

“… the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book
is one of the main reasons I read;
but it doesn't happen every time
or even every other time,
and when it does happen,
I am truly beside myself.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Books, Time, Reading

“Once you lose that sense of wonder at being alive, you're pretty much on the way out…”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Way, Sense

“You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

Italo Calvino book Invisible Cities

Source: Invisible Cities

Question

“I wondered why I hadn't loved that day more, why I hadn't savored every bit of it… why I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and every day any longer.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Source: One True Thing

Love

“Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious
defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking
after himself.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

God, Help

“So just look mean and don’t make eye contact with anyone. (Syn)
Gee, hon, you take me to the most wonderful places. (Shahara)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of Fire

“You're a wonderful person, Jamie. You're beautiful, you're kind, you're gentle… you're everything that I'd like to be. If people don't like you, or they think you're strange, then that's their problem.”

Nicholas Sparks book A Walk to Remember

Source: A Walk to Remember

People, Beauty, Problem, Thinking

“Fine art is something wonderful that's left long into the future… eternal beauty.”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

Beauty, Art, Future

“And I wonder how Gage knew this is what my soul has craved. He turns me to face him, his eyes searching. It occurs to me that no one in my life has ever concerned himself so thoroughly with my happiness.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Sugar Daddy

Life, Happiness, Soul, Search

“When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Love, People, Reading

“I had been in the ditch for 2 and a half min. I wondered if my friends missed me.”

Wendy Mass (1967) American children's writer

Source: Finally

“Inigo Montoya: He's right on top of us. I wonder if he is using the same wind we are using.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

“I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Thinking, Sense, Country

“I wonder how much of the day I spend just callin' after you.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

“As one, the shapechangers turned and looked at me. I wondered what they'd do if I asked to borrow a cup of sugar.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bites

“It was better to know the worst than to wonder.”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

“Soldiers live. He dies and not you, and you feel guilty, because you're glad he died, and not you. Soldiers live, and wonder why.”

Glen Cook book Soldiers Live

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 99, “By the Military Cemetery: Missing Persons” (p. 664)
Context: “It doesn’t make much sense, does it?” my darling whispered to me. “People go at the oddest times and from the oddest causes.”
“Soldiers live,” I muttered.
“You’re turning that into a mantra.”
“You feel guilty. You wonder why him and not me, then you’re glad it was him and not you, then you feel guilty. Soldiers live. And wonder why.”

Feeling

“I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Love, People

“I wondered if there were other restless people asking the question with me:.”

Shane Claiborne (1975) American activist

People, Question

“I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life.”

Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) German film director, photographer, actress and dancer

Life, Feeling, Heart

“Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW… so you stop asking.”

Ram Dass book Be Here Now

Source: Be Here Now

“It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Love, Making love, Time, Cry

“I wonder how many people I have looked at all my life and never really seen.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Variant: I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.
Source: East of Eden

Life, People

“Simon bristled. She wasn’t his Isabelle, not anymore. He wondered if she ever truly had been. Isabelle didn’t seem like the type of girl to belong to someone. It was one of the things he liked best about her.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Lost Herondale

Girl

“Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else.”

Michael Crichton book The Lost World

Seventh Configuration "Departure"
Source: The Lost World (1995)
Context: A hundred years from now, people will look back on us and laugh. They'll say, 'You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?' They'll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer and better fantasies. And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That's the sea. That's real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That's all real. You see all of us together? That's real. Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else.

Life, Sun

“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

“… what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.”

Norton Juster book The Phantom Tollbooth

Variant: What you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.
Source: The Phantom Tollbooth

Secret, Learning, Help