Fathom Quotes - Page 3

For why are we here if not to try to fathom one another? Not through facts alone, but with the full extent of our imaginations. And what are stories if not tools for imagining?

Leah Hager Cohen

Imagination, Trying, Tools

Leah Hager Cohen (2014). “No Book but the World: A Novel”, p.180, Penguin

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After decades of faithful study, ecologists have begun to fathom hidden likenesses among many interwoven systems. ...a canon of nature's laws, strategies, and principles...
Nature runs on sunlight.
Nature uses only the energy it needs.
Nature fits form to function.
Nature recycles everything.
Nature rewards cooperation.
Nature banks on diversity.
Nature demands local expertise.
Nature curbs excesses from within.
Nature taps the power of limits.

Janine Benyus

Running, Nature, Law

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A friend is a beloved mystery; dearest always because he is not ourself, and has something in him which it is impossible for us to fathom. If it were not so, friendship would lose its chief zest.

Lucy Larcom

Friendship, Zest, Impossible

Lucy Larcom (1892). “The Unseen Friend”

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It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.

Arundhati Roy

Dream, Believe, Heart

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No factions? A world in which no one knows who they are or where they fit? I can't even fathom it. I imagine only chaos and isolation.

Veronica Roth

World, Chaos, Isolation

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It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn't the number-one box office star in America, because every straight girl I know would see her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker.

Chuck Klosterman

Girl, Stars, Years

Chuck Klosterman (2004). “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto”, p.2, Simon and Schuster

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After she left everything fell apart. No Jew was safe. There were rumors of unfathomable things, and because we couldn't fathom them we failed to believe them, until we had no choice and it was too late. p 8

Nicole Krauss

Believe, Choices, Rumor

Nicole Krauss (2006). “The History of Love: A Novel”, p.8, W. W. Norton & Company

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Is Virgin you trying to fathom me

Jack Kerouac

Trying, Virgins

Jack Kerouac (2012). “Big Sur (Annotated)”, p.33, BookBaby

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I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget.

Henry Miller

Eye, Cities, Order

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Each civilization may choose one of two roads to travel, that is, either fret itself to death, or pet itself to death. And in the course of doing one or the other, it eats its way into the Universe, turning cinders and flinders of stars into toilet seats, pegs, gears, cigarette holders and pillowcases, and it does this because, unable to fathom the Universe, it seeks to change that Fathomlessness into Something Fathomable.

Stanislaw Lem

Stars, Two, Civilization

"The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age". Book by Stanisław Lem, translated by Michael Kandel. "Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius", §10, 1974.

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It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, i thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. There are no more books to be written, thank God.

Henry Miller

Book, Fall, Men

Henry Miller, Norman Mailer (1976). “Genius and lust: a journey through the major writings of Henry Miller”, Grove Press

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While she could hardly fathom what had just happened to her that night, she reached some conclusions before she fell asleep, certain things now made perfect sense; Moon River didn't sound so syrupy, mistletoe wasn't such a bad idea, and perhaps dating was not such a frivolous waste of time after all.

E. A. Bucchianeri

Moon, Night, Ideas

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When we can build something like the Hubble telescope and fathom images of this vast cosmos of which we are a part, it really gives pause to wonder what and who we are within a larger framework than linear adventures at the shopping mall and taxes.

Vanna Bonta

Adventure, Shopping, Giving

"Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview". Interview with Laurel van der Linde, 2007.

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Our heirs, whatever or whoever they may be, will explore space and time to degrees we cannot currently fathom. They will create new melodies in the music of time. There are infinite harmonies to be explored.

Clifford A. Pickover

Space, Degrees, May

Clifford A. Pickover (1999). “Time: A Traveler's Guide”, p.245, Oxford University Press

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Cats are possessed of a shy, retiring nature, cajoling, haughty, and capricious, difficult to fathom. They reveal themselves only to certain favored individuals, and are repelled by the faintest suggestion of insult or even by the most trifling deception.

Pierre Loti

Appreciation, Cat, Deception

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...for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.

Diane Ackerman

Children, Pain, Memories

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That's the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You'll love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and -- in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth of your love -- you come to understand the tragic, unrequited love of your own parents.

Ursula Hegi

Children, Love You, Unrequited Love

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It was like discovering that your innermost fires and terrors, the things you believed no one else could fathom, were in fact the basis of a recognized philosophy. Some part of you felt intimately invaded, threatened; some other part fell to its knees and sobbed in gratitude that it was no longer alone.

Poppy Z. Brite

Gratitude, Philosophy, Fire

Poppy Z. Brite (1997). “Exquisite Corpse”, p.155, Simon and Schuster

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I am unaware of his plans but I shall never stop believing in them because I cannot fathom them and I prefer to mistrust my own intellectual capacities than his justice.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Believe, Justice, Intellectual

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The question of good and evil remains in irremediable chaos for those who seek to fathom it in reality. It is mere mental sport to the disputants, who are captives that play with their chains.

Voltaire

Sports, Reality, Play

Voltaire (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of Voltaire (Illustrated)”, p.4171, Delphi Classics

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The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious.

Francine Prose

Bereavement, Trying, Mystery Of Death

Francine Prose (2012). “Goldengrove”, p.29, Atlantic Books Ltd

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It is strange that we know so little about the properties of numbers. They are our handiwork, yet they baffle us; we can fathom only a few of their intricacies. Having defined their attributes and prescribed their behavior, we are hard pressed to perceive the implications of our formulas.

James R Newman

Numbers, Littles, Strange

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We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Girl, Jobs, Animal

Jeffrey Eugenides (1993). “The Virgin Suicides: A Novel”, p.40, Macmillan

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I love the sea with its impenetrable fathoms, its wash and undertow, and rasp of shingle sucked anew.

Margaret E. Barber

Ocean, Sea, Shingles

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Thought engenders thought. Place one idea on paper, another will follow it, and still another, until you have written a page; you cannot fathom your mind. There is a well of thought which has no bottom; the more you draw from it, the more clear and fruitful it will be.

George Augustus Henry Sala

Ideas, Mind, Paper

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