Astonishments Quotes & Sayings

There are lots of ways to dance and to spin, sometimes it just starts my feet first then my entire body, I am spinning no one can see it but it is happening. I am so glad to be alive, I am so glad to be loving and loved. Even if I were close to the finish, even if I were at my final breath, I would be here to take a stand, bereft of such astonishments, but for them. If I were a Sufi for sure I would be one of the spinning kind. — Mary Oliver

Whether they be young in spirit, or young in age, the members of
the Democratic Party must never lose that youthful zest for new
ideas and for a better world, which has made us great. — John F. Kennedy

The spiritual energy of our time, as I've come to understand it, is not a rejection of the rational disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades - law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions ... they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to each other. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address and religions traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them. — Krista Tippett

Who can say what astonishments are hidden inside the most mundane being? — Kate DiCamillo

Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you. — E. Lockhart

When I sleep to much I don't score. That's the reason I like to go out a lot. — Romario

You don't ask, you don't get. — Java Davis

I loved every minute of my childhood - sunbathing on the fire escape, digging for buried treasure in the back yard, pulling alewives out of the sand ... Then it was all taken away from me. I came back every summer to visit my father until I was 18, but I was always the outsider. — Jennifer Egan

I just think of Fannie Lou Hamer, because even though she didn't know my name Ms. Hamer was thinking of me. I just want to do a good job, because I want her to look over that edge of heaven and say, "That's why I did it. That's why. I knew we had the capacity and the talent to be everything America says we can't be. All we needed was an open door." — Leah D. Daughtry

It's such a luxury as an actor to think of your career as something you're choosing for yourself, because so much of the time as an actor you're just hoping that exciting projects come your way. — Marin Ireland

To live in the city of crowds and traffic and constant noise, to be always striving, to be in the ceaseless competition for money and status and power, perhaps distracted the mind until it could no longer see - and forgot - the all that is. Or maybe, because of the pace and pressure of that life, sanity depended on blinding oneself to the manifold miracles, astonishments, wonders, and enigmas that comprised the true world. — Dean Koontz

I started a band because I actually thought I could be Bon Jovi, and now here I am, sitting in a puddle of sludge in an abandoned car park with a bloody nose and soggy underpants, covered in sick. — Christopher Russell

It is generally admitted that the cultural values (humanization) and the existing institutions and policies of society are rarely,if ever, in harmony. This opinion has found expression in the distinction between culture and civilization, according to which "culture" refers to some higher dimension of human autonomy and fulfillment, while "civilization" designates the realm of necessity, of socially necessary work and behavior, where man is not really himself and in his own element but is subject to heteronomy, to external conditions and needs. — Herbert Marcuse

Comedy is all about having a point of view, and it's also about power. — Judy Gold

The general election's taking place today in Iraq, so I guess that means we're one step closer to being there for another 10 years. — David Letterman

Every plant is an individual.
Wrong again. We are not individuals at all, we are all connected. We are individuals the way each blossom on an apple tree is an individual. — Dale Pendell

The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is 'Don't talk about the psychological meltdown.' — Ben Horowitz

When no one else is around, we open ourselves to the quieter astonishments that enormity can offer. — David Levithan