#wonder

We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#attitude #wonder #attitude

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#bravery #courage #curiousity #freedom #heroism

Do people look the same when they go to heaven, mommy?" "I don't know. I don't think so." "Then how do people recognize each other?" "I don't know, sweetie. They just feel it. You don't need your eyes to love, right? ↗

— R.J. Palacio

#heaven #love #wonder #death

My coffee gets increasingly better the more I drink and the closer I come to the bottom of the cup, where all the sugar is. I wonder if life is the same way as we approach the end. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#death #drink #end #finality #life

Who are you?" "I am Death," said the creature. "I thought that was obvious." "But you're so small!" "Only because you are small. You are young and far from your Death, September, so I seem as anything would seem if you saw it from a long way off-very small, very harmless. But I am always closer than I appear. As you grow, I shall grow with you, until at the end, I shall loom huge and dark over your bed, and you will shut your eyes so as not to see me. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#ominous #touching #death

I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate. ↗

— Kathy Acker

#reading #wonder #dreams

Is it folly to believe in something that is intangible? After all, some of the greatest intangibles are Love, Hope, and Wonder. Another is Deity. The choice to be a fool is yours. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#deity #faith #folly #god #hope

I know it doesn't feel this way all the time, but we get to choose what we care about and what we spend our resources on. We choose what - or ideally whom - to lust after. We choose what to watch, what to like, what to build, how to spend the breaths that we've been alive. And the fact that many of our choices are unconscious - get that handbag, get that Starbucks, look at that Snooki - does not in any way make us less responsible for those choices. I'm happiest when I feel like I'm part of a community that helps me choose more intelligently and with greater empathy. And I, for one, like the choices we made this weekend. ↗

— John Green

#intelligence

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. ↗

— Rachel Carson

#nature #wonder #life

There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#ordinary #strange #wonder #life