Strangeness Quotes - Page 2

• Not till we are completely lost, or turned round, do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Appreciate, Vastness, Lost

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.124, Xist Publishing

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• The magic of childhood is the strangeness of childhood — the uniqueness that makes us see things that other people don't see.

  Maurice Sendak

  People, Childhood, Magic

  5 Copy quote

• The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Dream, Medicine, Fields

  4 Copy quote

• It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.

  Samuel Beckett

  Simple, Light, Doe

  Samuel Beckett (2009). “Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable”, p.176, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• (What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  World, Blind, Hard

  9 Copy quote

• Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Thinking, Hands, Years

  "Mapping Ideology" by Slavoj Žižek, p.1, 1994.

  117 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I was eleven I stopped dreaming the dreams that didn't come true, I stopped talking to people who didn't listen, I lost hope and I retreated. I assumed that the root of the problem was that I was too strange for the real world. That being the case, I created a charming and dynamic personality to make the necessary forays into the Outside, and I kept my strangeness for myself; my own peculiar jewels under lock and key.

  Rosanne Cash

  Dream, Real, Self

  7 Copy quote

• The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Men, Idols, Sides

  4 Copy quote

• It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Mistake, Mystery

  1887 A Study in Scarlet, ch.7.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

  Toni Morrison

  Art, Discipline, Imagination

  Sula (1973)

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Eye, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.103, Simon and Schuster

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.

  Louis Aragon

  Flower, Errors, Strange

  23 Copy quote

• The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Change, Time, Tunnels

  Joyce Carol Oates (1993). “Foxfire: confessions of a girl gang”, E P Dutton

  38 Copy quote

  Show source

• To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere." "To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Men, Practice, Waiting

  Michel de Montaigne (1991). “The essays of Michel de Montaigne”, Lane, Allen

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.

  Jon Ronson

  Interesting, Personality, Anxiety

  Jon Ronson (2011). “The Psychopath Test”, p.170, Pan Macmillan

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• What a strange thing is man! And what a stranger is woman.

  Lord Byron

  Men, Strange, Stranger

  "Don Juan".

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.

  Edward Abbey

  Rain, Fire, Light

  Edward Abbey (1988). “Desert Solitaire”, p.13, University of Arizona Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Suffering, Tears, Gone

  W. Somerset Maugham (2009). “Of Human Bondage”, p.64, The Floating Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

  P. D. James

  Father, Men, Land

  P. D. James (2010). “The Children of Men”, p.41, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family, and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways, immobile and thus unfettered.

  Matthew Tobin Anderson

  Country, Book, Reading

  4 Copy quote

• I work in a strange business, and trust is a word that's not even in the vocabulary.

  Kim Basinger

  Business, Vocabulary, Strange

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.

  Samuel Pepys

  Inspirational, Dinner, Strange

  'Diary' 9 November 1665

  101 Copy quote

  Show source

• Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.

  William Shakespeare

  Funny, Depression, Husband

  'The Tempest' (1611) act 2, sc. 2, l. [42]

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about.

  Regina Doman

  Hero, Adventure, Boys

  4 Copy quote

• I want the strangeness and weirdness and incomprehensibility of life that art can reflect so well, but I want it to feel like a mystery that is inviting us in. Sagan's great art lesson for me was generosity of wonder and making curiosity contagious.

  Dario Robleto

  Art, Generosity, Curiosity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source