Quotes About Wonder

How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.

I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267).

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.

Seeing the open pits in the open air, among farms, is the wonder, and seeing the bodies twist free from the soil. The sight of a cleaned clay soldier upright in a museum case is unremarkable, and this is all that future generations will see. No one will display those men crushed beyond repair; no one will display their loose parts; no one will display them crawling from the walls. Future generations will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth.

The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind.

The Mahabharata says, "Of all the world's wonders, which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.

I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars themselves neither require nor demand it.

I don't know your life history, but I think children need to believe in powers outside themselves. That's why they read books about witches and wizards and God knows what. There is a human need for that which childhood normally exhausts. But if a child's world is broken up by too much reality, that need goes underground.

I wonder what it's like to be dead.

she is said to have possessed golden sandals that carried her over water and land

You're not human, Eleanore Jones. I think that somewhere inside you, you must know that. You must always have known. You're not made of ordinary bone or blood but of something else completely." "Really. What am I of, then? Kelp and jellyfish, I suppose?" "You are made of magic." He said it in an absolutely unremarkable way, as if instead he'd just said, I had coffee this morning or the floor needs mopping.

The forest is blanketed by the greenest ferns and moss and bonsai-like trees, a wild majesty that beckons hobbits and pixies and elves and dreamers.

I wondered If things that might seem frightening could lose their hold over you. I wondered If we find the people we need when we need them. I wondered If we attract our future by some sort of invisible force, or If we are drawn to it by a similar force. I felt I was turning a corner and that change was afoot.

But I thought about all the things that had to have spun into place in order for us to be alive and for us to be right there, right then. I thought about the few thing we thought we knew and the billions of things we couldn't know, all spinning, whirling our there somewhere.

And why do I have to tell more about the blue car splattered with mud speeding down the road?

Is it not a wondrous thing, to see your child born?" He nodded. "Indeed. But I'll tell you what is no less wondrous to me right now. That after a woman endures all this, why she is then willing to let any man ever again get within ten feet of her bed!

Genuine awe connects us with the world in a new way.

To have the kind of openness that cultivates awe does not mean we have to be credulous and sentimental, but the ironic stance—to act unimpressed because we fear looking foolish—has us experiencing our own lives at a distance. If, instead, we open our hearts to real love, we allow ourselves to feel the wonder of life, which research says is vital to sustaining our connection to the world and to one another.

I used to wonder: Do only ignorant laypeople gaze on the colossal bust of Ramses II at the British Museum and ask themselves how it ended up there? Is it only the unschooled visitor who looks at the soaring column from the Temple of Artemis at the Met and questions why it exists in this place?

Hinduism professes no false certitudes. Its capacity to express wonder at Creation and simultaneously scepticism about the omniscience of the Creator are unique to Hinduism. Both are captured beautifully in this verse from the 3,500-year-old Rig Veda, the Nasadiya Sukta or Creation Hymn:

Well, strangeness was hard to think about. Wonder grazes you like a bullet; it zips by and is gone, and all you really perceive is the zing as it goes past, or maybe the pain if it comes too close. It does no good to search for whatever it was, for it never lodges anywhere you can get a good look at it. The truly strange has no hooks of familiarity that one can catch hold of.

Am I defined by what I've seen, or do I define the world by what I've witnessed? O, what beautiful or terrible thing waits around the next corner? Who isn't in love with this mystery?