Smallness Quotes - Page 3

• I might try that one thing, you know, that thing people do when their eyes get all wet and stupid—what’s it called? Crying? Or NOT. I might PUNCH you instead and trust that you won’t punch me back because of my endearing smallness. It would be like punching a child.

  Laini Taylor

  Children, Stupid, Eye

  Laini Taylor (2012). “Days of Blood and Starlight: Daughter of Smoke and Bone Trilogy”, p.17, Hachette UK

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• As I'm never going to be old, I'm glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness.

  Douglas Coupland

  World, Wonder, Lost

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• Naked girls with the heads of Marx and Malraux prone and helpless in the glare of the headlights, tried to give them a little joie de vivre but maybe it didn't take, their constant bickering and smallness, it's like a stroke of lightning, the world reminds you of its power, tracheotomies right and left, I am spinning, my pretty child, don't scratch, pick up your feet, the long nights, spent most of my time listening, this is a test of the system, this is only a test.

  Donald Barthelme

  Girl, Children, Night

  Donald Barthelme (1981). “Sixty stories”, Putnam Adult

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• Though I was satisfied that I was on the verge of perhaps a magnificent find, probably one of the missing tombs that I had been seeking for many years, I was much puzzled by the smallness of the opening in comparison with those of other royal tombs in the valley.

  Howard Carter

  Years, Missing, Valleys

  Howard Carter's Diary, November 5, 1922.

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• I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house the half-floor that forces you to duck, to feel small and naive again, ready for anything, dying for love, your body a chimney filled with odd, black smoke. These square, squat, awkward rooms are like a fifty-square-foot paean to teenage-hood, to ripeness, to the first and last taste of youth.

  Gary Shteyngart

  Teenage, Love You, Ducks

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• Immediately upon the fall, the mind of man shrank from its primitive greatness and expandedness, to an exceeding smallness and contractedness... Before, his soul was under the government of the noble principles of divine love, whereby it was enlarged to the comprehensiveness of all his fellow creatures and their welfare... [But] sin, like some powerful astringent, contracted his soul to the very small dimensions of selfishness, and God was forsaken, and man retired within himself, and became totally governed by narrow and selfish principles and feelings.

  Jonathan Edwards

  Powerful, Selfish, Fall

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• If we love-and-serve an ideal we reach backward in time to its inception and forward to its consummation. To grow is sometimes to hurt; but who would return to smallness?

  Sarah-Patton Boyle

  Hurt, Return, Sometimes

  Sarah-Patton Boyle, Jennifer Lynn Ritterhouse (1962). “The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition”, p.320, University of Virginia Press

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• City and country -- each has its own beauty and its own pain. Some of the smallness of small towns -- cattiness, everybody knowing everybody's business -- that can be challenging. And cities can be challenging, because no one can connect except electronically.

  William P. Young

  Country, Pain, Cities

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• I have often thought how strange it is that men can at once and the same moment cheerfully consign our sex to lives either of narrowest toil or senseless luxury and vanity, and then sneer at the smallness of our aims, the pettiness of our thoughts, the puerility of our conversation!

  Frances Power Cobbe

  Sex, Men, Vanity

  Frances Power Cobbe (1882). “The Duties of Women: A Course of Lectures”

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• I suppose the half-breeds in Manitoba, in 1870, did not fight for two hundred forty acres of land, but it is to be understood there were two societies who treated together. One was small, but in its smallness it had its rights. The other was great, but in its greatness it had no greater rights than the rights of the small, because the right is the same for everyone.

  Louis Riel

  Fighting, Greatness, Two

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• I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations or men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it.

  John Ruskin

  Believe, Greatness, Men

  John Ruskin (2013). “The Stones of Venice -: The Fall”, p.158, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The smallness of our desires may contribute reasonably to our wealth.

  William Cobbett

  Desire, May, Riches

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• You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Men, Thinking, Important

  "Listen, Little Man!". Book by Wilhelm Reich, 1948.

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• Those who understand the cross increasingly see their sin as God does, and therefore begin to feelabout sin as does God. We begin to mourn for and hate it. In other words, at the cross God becomes larger and we become smaller. This separation is at the heart of the fear of God. This "fear" opens God's wisdom to us because only in light of God's immensity can I see the importance of living for the right end, his glory. And only in the light of my smallness can I feel overawed by the means he used to save me, his cross.

  William F. Farley

  Hate, Mean, Heart

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• So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.

  Louise Erdrich

  Stars, Eye, Night

  Louise Erdrich (2010). “Love Medicine”, p.257, Odyssey Editions

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• I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

  David Foster Wallace

  Crush, Selfish, Simple

  "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: An Essay". Book by David Foster Wallace, 1997.

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• I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Dream, Angel, Wings

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• New Yorkers love the bigness -- the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you're waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too.

  David Levithan

  Odds, Order, Eight

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• Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Giving, Want

  Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.14, PublicAffairs

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• It's the abject smallness of the earth that gets you.

  Stuart Roosa

  Space, Earth

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• Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

  John Updike

  Fighting, Witness

  "Tuesday, and After", www.newyorker.com. September 24, 2001.

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• The real test of love is when a person—including you—can know your weaknesses, your stupidities and your smallnesses, and still love you.

  Dossie Easton

  Real, Love You, Love Is

  Dossie Easton, Catherine A. Liszt (1997). “The ethical slut: a guide to infinite sexual possibilities”, Greenery Pr

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• To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

  Denis Diderot

  Greatness, Men, Light

  "The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations". Book by Norbert Gutermam, 1963.

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• I stared up in disbelief at the information my eyes fed my brain, and lost myself to the stars.
  For the first time in my life I had a greater idea of how infinitesimally small our planet really is and, furthermore, how tiny and insignificant I am in the grand scheme of the vast universe.
  I took a seat on a rock next to Lily and took in the moment to comprehend the vastness of everything else, and the incredible smallness of I.

  Craig Stone

  Stars, Eye, Ideas

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• I thought my mountain was coming this morning. It was near to speaking when suddenly it shifted, sulked, and returned to smallness. It has eluded me again and sits there, puny and dull. Why?

  Emily Carr

  Morning, Failure, Mountain

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