Quotes About Wonder

The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe . . . The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.

If only life were like a Jules Verne novel, thinks Marie-Laure, and you could page ahead when you most needed to, and learn what would happen.

It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.

Seventy-six years old," she whispers, "and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in my eyes?

The stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky.

Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you.

Did dreams, he wondered, when they arrived, make a sound? The smallest kind, like the noise of an embryo being conceived, or a snowflake touching down?

Grandfather said that the ocean was large enough to contain every dream everyone had ever dreamed, but until now he had no comprehension of what that meant.

I think about how Grandpa Z says the sky is blue because it's dusty and octopuses can unscrew the tops off jars and starfish have eyes at the tips of their arms. I think: No matter what happens, no matter how wretched and gloomy everything can get, at least Mrs. Sabo got to feel this.

Ojalá la vida fuera como una novela de Julio Verne y uno pudiera pasar las páginas cuando lo necesita para saber lo que va a suceder más adelante.

He says she is his émerveillement.

she loves to ask them about their lives, to wonder what adventures they've had, what lusts, what secret follies they carry in their hearts.

De entre todas las cosas que he visto en la vida, creo que el mar es mi favorita. A veces me descubro mirándolo y me olvido completamente de mis obligaciones. Es lo bastante grande como para contener en su interior todas las cosas que un hombre puede sentir a lo largo de toda una vida.

Doesn't look like much, does he?" murmurs Frederick. "Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire." The wagtail hops from twig to twig. Werner rubs his aching eyes. It's just a bird. "Ten thousand years ago," whispers Frederick, "they came through here in the millions. When this place was a garden, one endless garden from end to end.

Any moment, it seemed, something could tear the sky and whatever was on the other sides would push through.

The star-flooded nights, the dew-soaked dawns, the hushed ambulatories, the enforced asceticism—never has Werner felt part of something so single-minded.

Time slows. The attic disappears. Jutta disappears. Has anyone ever spoken so intimately about the very things Werner is most curious about? Open

Read a certain way, the Natural History is preposterous, full of erroneous assumptions and cast-off mythology. Read another way, it is a window into Roman understanding two millennia ago. Read another way, it is a tribute to wonder itself

Beneath her fingernails, the frost makes billions of tiny diadems and coronas on the slats of the bench, a lattice of dumbfounding complexity.

Parachuting through the air around him, blown out of the firs, are hundreds of pine needles bundled in twos. He catches one, imagines it as a little man with a truncated torso and long slender legs. The NeedleMan ventures across the clearing on his pointy feet.

There is magic in this world...You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you.

I suppose that is the point, no? To make us wonder?

He says there are sixty-five million specimens in this place, and if you have the right teacher, each can be as interesting as the last.

Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.