Quotes About Wonder

But that's crazy!" Pep said. "Who would attack the largest ball of twine in the world?" "The largest cat in the world?" suggested Coke.

Did you know that we live inside the sun?

do you think MM stands for?" I asked. "March Madness?" replied Michael, who never ties his shoes. "Marilyn Monroe?" said Ryan, who will eat anything, even stuff that isn't food. "Mickey Mouse?" said Neil, who we call the nude kid even though he wears clothes. "My Mom?" said Alexia, this girl who rides a skateboard all the time. Everybody was buzzing, which was weird because we're not bees.

story I ever heard!" Emily said. Then she started

blah blah blah

Unlike people from any other time in history, we know what we are looking at when we look up upon the night sky.

The Magical Zoo

We love pictures, descriptions, testimonies from folks who've been there, and an idea of what there is to do once we've arrived. Without this information our excitement dims considerably, especially when the place we're thinking about lasts forever.

There are days when you wonder why these wretched old tatters of paper run my life. It's just leftover scraps from vanished lives, right? And they seem to control your every waking thought, all of your movements, even how you breathe, sometimes, with the fragile stuff. Your whole life. But then something comes along, a clue or sometimes the solution to a puzzle, and it sets you on fire!

She tasted like the blank page of a book before he'd written the first word, the possibilities limitless.

In your whole life, only in young childhood, and only if you were very fortunate, could you get a measure of innocence—a time free of knowing what will come, of what must come. Those moments, that simple engagement of only what was wonderful about being alive, that love, really, would be at the center of you forever; deep inside, you would have this tender core that believed everything would be okay.

It's hard to feel down when you're out in the natural world, and there's a reason for that. Scientists would call it quantum physics,

As a kid, I kind of spent my life being amazed by being tricked. I love being tricked. I still love it today.

A little kid's life bursts with autotelic experiences.

We search for the ordinary when we are surrounded by the extraordinary.

I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it. —Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, p. xii

The childlike sense of wonder that we had as children, the sense that there is adventure in each activity, is partly what gave us such strong memories when we were young—it's not that we're slipping into dementia.

survive difficult parenting moments, and they want their kids and their family to thrive. As parents ourselves, we share these same goals for our own families. In our nobler, calmer, saner moments, we care about nurturing our kids' minds, increasing their sense of wonder, and helping them reach their

As a young boy growing up in rural India, most of what I knew of the world was what I could see around me. But each night, I would look at the Moon - it was impossibly far away, yet it held a special attraction because it allowed me to dream beyond my village and country, and think about the rest of the world and space.

It's almost easy for me to write about a magnificent tropical village with orchids and dragonflies. That's intoxicating, but the United States is magical, too. We just forget this.

Now in the 1980s, I happened to notice that if you look at an aerial photograph of an African village, you see fractals. And I thought, 'This is fabulous! I wonder why?' And of course I had to go to Africa and ask folks why.

In a kind of simple, stupid way, when you walk down a normal city block and you turn around the corner and there's 40 vintage cars and every storefront has been done over to look like 1941, it just kind of blows your mind. It's movie magic.

I like the lasso of truth. There is something so beautiful about the fact that people have to tell the truth when they have the lasso around them. And it's not too violent.

I actually believe more in outer space in Virginia, because I can look up at the sky and count the stars.