Quotes About Vastness

And all around is the desert; a corner of the mournful kingdom of sand.

As dizzy as the stars, as near and alone.

The boy could scarcely believe the size of the boulders, clustered under the enormous sun like dead red rockets awaiting repair, or the span of the sky, a cheerfully vacant blue dome, the desert's hallucinatory choreography achieved through stillness, brightness, darkness, distance -- and all of this before noon.

But the desert offers something that no forest, brook or valley ever can: distance. A cloudless rooming house for couples. Skies that will host any visitors' dreams with the bald hospitality of pure space.

He hoped that all understanding might be as simple as a matter of scale. If a man had not a week, not a year, not even a lifetime—if he had millennia, aeons—all the seemingly erratic movements of heavenly bodies and earthly vicissitudes would turn out to have meaning. Some kinds of order were too vast for a human to know. But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.

There was an almost frightening breadth and depth and height to the place, alive with openness and the wild energy of breeze and trees and the crying gulls and the brilliant water. Alone, a speck of human in a place big enough to swallow me, I looked about with eyes that seemed open for the first time.

The night itself is riddled with her, wide with her, and alive with her.

A poor humiliated love burns in the house I see. In the vastness of the world, full of hard marvels, this love exists and suffers, wounded as no other.

all energy—that it extends into space at the

Nothing can play havoc with your sense of scale better than looking deeply into the night skies. It can leave you feeling immense and privileged one minute, minuscule and insignificant the next.

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?

Being by the sea is like a permanent baptism; the light and air hypnotizes, and your soul is washed by vastness.

However ghostly it seems, you sense solidity through the soles of your shoes and know yourself to be a part of something big and strong;" wrote Dickinson; "a thousand other men and more, great guns, a powder magazine, an electric power plant that could run a city, a machine shop, beds and kitchens; all of this is compactly organized inside a vast steel hull, your planet.

Look at the sky; remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity in order to see the smallness of yourself.

You can either see yourself as a wave in the ocean or you can see yourself as the ocean.

The sky cares nothing for you, dear one. The stars don't even see you.

Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself.

There are lots of ideas which extend the Copernican principle one step further. We went from the solar system to the galaxy to zillions of galaxies and now to realising even that isn't all there is.

I just stood there, like a grain of sand amongst amillion others on a beach.

I love the desert and its incomparable sense of space.

It takes so much to make you feel big in this world. It only takes an ocean to make you feel tiny.

The air is so dry, so clear, and there's so few people, almost no lights. And you can lie on your back and look up and see the Milky Way. All the stars like a splash of milk in the sky. And you see them slowly move. Because the Earth is moving. And you feel like you're lying on a giant spinning ball in space.

He had seen lakes and rivers, but Connla had never seen an ocean, and its very size was beyond his comprehension.  "Where does it end?" he asked Blathine.  "It does not end. The ocean is everything. All the land is merely an interruption in the sea."  Her words made no sense; such things could not be possible.

There was a time when "man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent," this New World, "commensurate to his capacity for wonder." I would strive with all my strength to give that sense of wonder to those who will come after me.