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Quotes About Wonder

about four inches down, he suddenly came into a small chamber in the cool-damp sand and there lay eggs, many eggs, almost perfectly round eggs the size of table tennis balls, and he laughed then because he knew. It had been a turtle.
~ Gary Paulsen
My mother cranes her neck. Her ability to be fascinated by things is her best gift to me.
~ Gary Shteyngart
The reflexive sense of wonder, of crying over a medal of the Madonna del Granduca and not knowing why, will be mostly replaced by survival and knowing perfectly well why. And survival will mean replacing the love of the beautiful with the love of what is funny, humor being the last resort of the besieged Jew, especially when he is placed among his own kind.
~ Gary Shteyngart
If only beauty could explain the world away.
~ Gary Shteyngart
The poetic image exists apart from causality.
~ Gaston Bachelard
Toujours, imaginer sera plus grand que vivre.
~ Gaston Bachelard
Most human beings I've met have a rather negative opinion of science. They think it is dull and abstruse, possibly even dangerous. But everyone, even on EARTH, is a scientist, really, whether he realizes it or not. Anyone who has ever watched and wondered how a bird flies, or a leaf unfurls, or concluded anything on the basis of his own observations, is a scientist. Science is a part of life.
~ Gene Brewer
Like just about everything else conjured up in the past century, the underground subway system of the modern city is an unfathomable engineering miracle covered in several inches of filth, urine, and spray paint. Despite being a certified member of the human race, I'll never fully understand why miracles of this magnitude are treated so casually.
~ Gene Doucette
In childhood, one imagines that any door unopened may open upon a wonder, a place different from all the places one knows. That is because in childhood it has so often proved to be so; the child, knowing nothing of any place except his own, is astonished and delighted by novel sights that an adult would readily have anticipated.
~ Gene Wolfe
There is no wonder, no amazement, quite like that felt when something supposed for amusement's sake to be magical and mysterious actually manifests the properties imagination has assigned it in jest--when the toy pistol shoots real bullets, the wishing well grants actual wishes, lovers from down the street fling themselves into Death's bright arms from Lovers' Leap
~ Gene Wolfe
The pool and the miniature vale that contained it, always dark, grew darker still. Looking up after countless kisses, he saw idling fish of mottled gold and silver, black, white, and red, hanging in air above the goddess's upraised hand, and for the first time noticed light streaming from a lamp of silver filigree in the branches of a stunted tree. "Where did they go?" he asked.
~ Gene Wolfe
And then I saw it—not below, where I had looked, but over my head, a vast and noble curve stretching away to either side, with white cloud flying between ourselves and it, a world all speckled over with blue and green like the egg of a wild bird.
~ Gene Wolfe
We would be blind, Auk. As blind as I. Because I have never had eyes of my own, I could not look out through yours. But I shall go with you, and guide you, and use your body to heal you, if I can. Look upon me, Auk." "There's nothing to see," Auk protested. But there was: a stammering light so filled with hope and pleasure and wonder that Auk would willingly have seen nothing else, if only he could have watched it forever.
~ Gene Wolfe
The plain shiprock walls, and the painted statue of Lord Pas (from which the paint was peeling) will remain with me until the day I die, always somewhat colored by the wonder I felt as a small boy at seeing a black cock struggling in the old man's hands after he had cut its throat, its wings beating frantically, beating as if they might live after all, live somehow somewhere, if only they could spray the whole place with blood before they failed. My
~ Gene Wolfe
The plain shiprock walls, and the painted statue of Lord Pas (from which the paint was peeling) will remain with me until the day I die, always somewhat colored by the wonder I felt as a small boy at seeing a black cock struggling in the old man's hands after he had cut its throat, its wings beating frantically, beating as if they might live after all, live somehow somewhere, if only they could spray the whole place with blood before they
~ Gene Wolfe
A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice, and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.
~ Gene Wolfe
he imagined himself a mouse descending a clear stream in half an eggshell, the master of a comet enfolding a hollow world.
~ Gene Wolfe
Is that the moon? I have been told it's more fertile.
~ Gene Wolfe
The forest had set its own dead there as well, stumps and limbs that time had turned to stone, so that I wondered as I descended, if it might not be that Urth is not, as we assume, older than her daughters the trees, and imagined them growing in the emptiness before the face of the sun, tree clinging to tree with tangled roots and interlacing twigs until at last their accumulation became our Urth, and they only the nap of her garment.
~ Gene Wolfe
When my grandson-in-law heard about it, he was fairly struck flat for half a day. Then he pasted up a kind of hat out of paper and held it over my stove, and it went up, and then he thought it was nothing that the cathedral rose, no miracle at all. That shows what it is to be a fool—it never came to him that the reason things were made so was so the cathedral would rise just like it did. He can't see the Hand in nature.
~ Gene Wolfe
Everything move...you wonder how it all knows where to go. Einstein wondered how birds knew where to migrate to. He thought they might follow lines of light in the sky. He saw everything as lines of light. That's how he was built. So we don't know how he moved, either. Any more than the birds.
~ Geoff Ryman
If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and which is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo? If it be wikke, a wonder thynketh me
~ Geoffrey Chaucer
MIRACLES, IN THE SENSE OF PHENOMENA WE CANNOT EXPLAIN, SURROUND US ON EVERY HAND: LIFE ITSELF IS THE MIRACLE OF MIRACLES.
~ George Bernard Shaw
A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith.
~ George Bernard Shaw