Crowding Out Quotes & Sayings

Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid. I thought how terrible the nights must have been in a time when men knew the things were there and were deadly. But no, that's wrong. If I knew they were there, I would have weapons against them, charms, prayers, some kind of alliance with forces equally strong but on my side. Knowing they were not there made me defenseless against them and perhaps more afraid. — John Steinbeck

the Jews should stay away from this trial -- for their own sake. For -- mark this well -- the charge "a war for the Jews" is still being made, and in the post-war years it will be made again and again. The too-large percentage of Jewish men and women here will be cited as proof of this charge. Sometimes it seems that the Jews will never learn about these things. They seem intent on bringing new difficulties down on their own heads. I do not like to write about this matter... but I am disturbed about it. They are pushing and crowding and competing with each other, and with everyone else. They will try the case I guess...

--Letters from Nuremberg, page 135 — Christopher J. Dodd

Chapter One The weather in Paris was unusually warm as Peter Haskell's plane landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The plane taxied neatly to the gate, and a few minutes later, briefcase in hand, Peter was striding through the airport. He was almost smiling as he got on the customs line, despite the heat of the day and the number of people crowding ahead of him in line. Peter Haskell loved Paris. He generally traveled to Europe — Danielle Steel

We plunge ourselves into enormous debt and then take two and three jobs to stay afloat. We uproot our families with unnecessary moves just so we can have a more prestigious house. We grasp and grab and never have enough. And most destructive of all, our flashy cars and sports spectaculars and backyard pools have a way of crowding out much interest in civil rights or inner city poverty or the starved masses of India. Greed has a way of severing the cords of compassion. Richard J. Foster, 1981 — Catherine Whitmire

Words are mighty, words are living:Serpents with their venomous stings,Or bright angels, crowding round us,With heaven's light upon their wings:Every word has its own spirit,True or false, that never dies;Every word man's lips have utteredEchoes in God's skies. — Adelaide Anne Procter

Offstage, she fixed him in place with compliments and ironic bossiness, and he tended not to look at her at all when they spoke. He was the only one in the band she called by name, implying a permanence to his position that was professionally reassuring but personally debilitating. When they wrote together or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happiness opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it, too. He sweated to ornament her fears and tall tales and fake portraits, and with the remnants of his energy he hid the rest of himself from her. The best of him was a child's drawing of her on an off day. — Arthur Phillips

A growing body of work in social psychology offers a possible explanation for this commercialization effect. These studies highlight the difference between intrinsic motivations (such as moral conviction or interest in the task at hand) and external ones (such as money or other tangible rewards). When people are engaged in an activity they consider intrinsically worthwhile, offering them money may weaken their motivation by depreciating or "crowding out" their intrinsic interest or commitment. — Michael J. Sandel

But bid life seize the present?
It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past.
The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing
Too present to imagine. — Robert Frost

Here's the secret to weight loss: It's all about crowding out, not cutting out. — Kathy Freston

All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up. — John Banville

The man who reads everything is like the man who eats everything: he can digest nothing, and the penalty of crowding one's mind with other men's thoughts is to have no thoughts of one's own. — Woodrow Wilson

At low tide, much of the sea changes to land, and then more than seven hundred islands can be counted. People come here to hide, to find something they can't find on the mainland, to get religion through solitude. From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss. But then the winters come and the tourists all go home and clouds hang on the horizon and unemployment doubles and the island dweller is left with whatever it is that led him to escape the rest of the world. — Timothy Egan

The poets are a harmless little folk, with their dreams and raptures and heaven full of Greek gods that they carry about with them in their fantasy. But they become wicked as soon as they presume to hold their ideal up to reality and then flail the latter angrily, when they should have nothing at all to do with it. They would, nevertheless, remain harmless if they were only granted their free little place in reality un disturbed and not compelled through crowding and pressure to cast a backward glance at it, for it reaches beyond the clouds, and they themselves cannot survey it all and must cling to the stars as provisory border points, of which, however, who knows how many are yet today invisible, their light still in the process of journeying down to us. — Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann

Open your eyes, heart and mind to an unknown atmosphere, where it's cool and clear with no judgments or prejudices but where mercy and peace abides, there you can come together in mind, become strong and bold dismissing all negativity which is connected to other people's wants and needs crowding your space. That is the place you become you and only you know what you want. — Pamela Smith Pettway

I've heard that almost all the people crowding around the big art openings barely look at the work on display and are just there to hobnob. Nothing wrong with that, except that none of them ever come back to look at the art - but they will tell everyone, and actually believe, that they have seen the exhibition. — Charles Saatchi

The crowding of children into insufficient, often squalid spaces seems an inexplicable anomaly in the United States. Images of spaciousness and majesty, of endless plains and soaring mountains, fill our folklore and our music and the anthems that our children sing. "This land is your land," they are told; and, in one of the patriotic songs that children truly love because it summons up so well the goodness and the optimism of the nation at its best, they sing of "good" and "brotherhood" "from sea to shining sea." It is a betrayal of the best things that we value when poor children are obliged to sing these songs in storerooms and coat closets. — Jonathan Kozol

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses
those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence. — Richard Ford

The evident problem with democracy today is that the state is pre-empting - or "crowding out," as the economists say - our moral judgments. Rulers are adding moral judgments to the expanding schedule of powers they exercise. Nor does the state deal merely with principles. It is actually telling its subjects to do very specific things. Yet decisions about how we live are what we mean by "freedom," and freedom is incompatible with a moralizing state. That is why I am provoked to ask the question: can the moral life survive democracy? — Kenneth Minogue

Is - is any of this real?" she asked. "Are you real?"
He lifted a hand to her cheek, his fingers brushing her jaw.
"Even if this is a dream," he whispered, "I'm not."
Isobel's eyes widened, recognizing those words as her own, the same ones she had once uttered to him. She reached for him, her arms twining around his neck, drawing him closer so his scent poured over her, that combination of incense, citrus, and dried leaves overriding the funeral funeral smell of the crowding flowers.
"Don't leave," she breathed.
"I'm here," he whispered. "Right here. Waiting. — Kelly Creagh

Anyone who's ever flown London to Sydney, seated next to or anywhere in the proximity of a fussy baby, you'll no doubt fall right into the swing of things in Hell. What with the strangers and crowding and seemingly endless hours of waiting for nothing to happen, for you Hell will feel like one long, nostalgic hit a deja vu. Especially if your in-flight movie was The English Patient. In Hell, whenever the demons announce they're going to treat everyone to a big-name Hollywood movie, don't get too excited because it's always The English Patient, or, unfortunately, The Piano. It's never The Breakfast Club. — Chuck Palahniuk

I had nixed the idea of having children when I was myself a child, having learned in the 1960s that human overpopulation was literally crowding other species off the planet. Why create another mouth to gnaw at the overburdened earth? — Sy Montgomery

Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee. — Edward Abbey

Electricity, Werner is learning, can be static by itself. But couple it with magnetism, and suddenly you have movement - waves. Fields and circuits, conduction and induction. Space, time, mass. The air swarms with so much that is invisible! How he wishes he had eyes to see the ultraviolet, eyes to see the infrared, eyes to see radio waves crowding the darkening sky, flashing through the walls of the house. — Anthony Doerr

He saw himself and his fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days.. — Chinua Achebe

Lenina was left to face the horrors of Malpais unaided. They came crowding in on her thick and fast. The spectacle of two young women giving the breast to their babies made her blush and turn away her face. — Aldous Huxley

New Yorkers only cross water for visual culture if the water is an ocean. The East River throws us for a huge loop. If we started going to Queens and the Bronx for visual culture, many of our rent, space, and crowding problems would be over indefinitely. — Jerry Saltz

Vigilance in watching opportunity, tact and daring in seizing upon opportunity, force and persistence in crowding opportunity to its utmost of possible achievement - these are the martial virtues which must command success — Austin Phelps

The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding ... — Flannery O'Connor

Had the new people learned what Original Man was taught at a council of animals - never damage Creation, and never interfere with the sacred purpose of another being - the eagle would look down on a different world. The salmon would be crowding up the rivers, and passenger pigeons would darken the sky. Wolves, cranes, Nehalem, cougars, Lenape, old-growth forests would still be here, each fulfilling their sacred purpose. I would be speaking Potawatomi. We would see what Nanabozho saw. It does not bear too much imagining, for in that direction lies heartbreak. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

I always get muscle aches in my eyes after a few hours of reading," she said. "Doesn't matter what. The closeness does it. All these words in your face, one at a time and filling your periphery. I love reading, but there's a limit.
"There are times," she went on, "when I don't leave my apartment for days. I read for hours without a break and feel like all I want to do is stand in a field and look as far as I can in any direction. I want a view, but I don't want to see anything. I just want something like an eye stretch."
"Why not just shut your eyes?" I asked. "What's the difference?"
"Closing my eyes is too much like nearness, like reading. It's black and it's in your face, sort of crowding you. Gazing down a prairie road stretches me and the muscles in my eyes. I don't necessarily want to see anything. Just look out. — Ryan Knighton

If there's unemployment, having the government help reduce that unemployment, increase employment directly is a pretty good idea. It's not driving out competition; it's not crowding out. — Jeremy Grantham

Dan, who was writing a book on the radical activity of the twenties and thirties, took the occasion of our trip to ask me about them. The whole thing seems to me so stale that I can't imagine anybody's now wanting to write about it, but we ran over the personalities and I told him a lot of stories. It seemed to me like that grisly museum of the early 1900's that I had had him visit at Niagara Falls: old stuffed two-headed calves, motheaten panthers attacking a stag, dried-up corpses from Indian graves, big bags made of rubber tires in which people had tried to shoot the falls
and around it all-powerful industrial life that no show of resistance could stop, which had ruined the landscape of the river and was crowding out everything else. — Edmund Wilson

Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it need only patience to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce to possessions, but which fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped out and its contour defined: it is limitless as the space which it finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinite as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the astronomer's gaze; it is as incapable of being restricted within assigned boundaries or being reduced to definitions of permanent validity, as the consciousness, the life, which seems to slumber in each monad, in every atom of matter, in each leaf and bud and cell, and is forever ready to burst forth into new forms of vegetable and animal existence. — James Joseph Sylvester

And at night, waking out of a dream, overwhelmed and bewitched by the crowding apparitions, a man perceives with alarm how slight is the support, how thin the boundary that divides him from the darkness. We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out. Then the muffled roar of the battle becomes a ring that encircles us, we creep in upon ourselves, and with big eyes stare into the night. — Erich Maria Remarque

George Orwell, on how to avoid thinking when you speak:
You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. they will construct your sentences for you
even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent
and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear ...
It does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this, is that it is easy. — George Orwell

The universe of his own feelings keeps crowding everyone else's out. It is a constant struggle to see other people as people, rather than as denizens of a dimension one level below the one in which he's doomed to wander, imperially alone. That someone close to him might right now be awake in a different part of the city, feeling a pain every bit as real as his own . . . he can think it, but cannot seem to remember it. And is 'remember' even the right word for something for which you have zero empirical evidence? Postulate, maybe. Imagine. He sweeps the lens back toward the window, where the cat hasn't stirred. Her tail twitches. An idea threatens to form, but doesn't. — Garth Risk Hallberg

White spiders, demon-headed and large as monkeys, had woven their webs in the hollow arches of the bones; and they swarmed out interminably as Nushain approached; and the skeleton seemed to stir and quiver as they seethed over it abhorrently and dropped to the ground before the astrologer. Behind them others poured in a countless army, crowding and mantling every ossicle. — Clark Ashton Smith

Plants with leaves no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous bacteria could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies. — K. Eric Drexler

Didn't you know I was out here, just waiting for a friend like you?"
"Of course I didn't know. I'd have been dancing on top of every bar in town, instead of studying, if I'd known that."
"Tell me not to kiss you," he said, when his lips were a breath away from mine.
"Don't kiss me," I told him, my voice a breathless rasp.
"Mean it," he said, crowding me into the corner of the pool.
He tilted my chin up with his finger.
"I can't," I gasped.
The words had barely left my lips before he was kissing me. — R.K. Lilley

Everyone started to file toward the door, crowding each other in their attempt to get the hell out of this flying deathtrap. I stood and waited for my turn, hefting my purse over my shoulder, and turned my cell phone back on. The second it lit up and I was able, I shot out a text.
Landed. Getting off now.
Romeo's response was instant, and I smiled.
I'm waiting. — Cambria Hebert

So if you're rooting around for something to eat, grab an apple while you're looking, and usually by the time you're finished eating it, your hunger will have been sidelined; it's crowding out at its best! — Kathy Freston

My wife spoke perfect Italian and she was very beautiful and very suave Italian men were crowding around her, talking all the time and if I was to even understand what was going on, I had to learn the language fast. — Clive James

Here I was, on the cusp of my own great dream, my own impossible truth, and this gluttonous man was crowding it with his improbable vision. There wasn't enough magic in the universe for both of us. Worse, Garth's mad theory put mine in an altogether new light. Was I as crazy as his fat ass? — Mat Johnson

It does
not matter; there's many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us of
a night that mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphere
of its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but to the
astronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its composition,
weight, path
the irregularities of its conduct, the aberrations of its
light
a sort of scientific scandal-mongering. — Joseph Conrad

Sssh says the ocean
Sssh says the small wave at the shore
sssh not so violent, not so proud, not so remarkable.
Sssh says the surf crowding around the outcrops, washing the shore.
Sssh, they say to people, this is our Earth, our eternity. — Rolf Jacobsen

Where Pan protects them. In the cool, wet places Of bushy clefts, nature's nymphs live hidden, 9880 The crowding trees reach upwards with their branches Longingly, after a higher region. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

To watch an American on a beach or crowding into a subway, or buying a theater ticket, or sitting at home with his radio on, tells you something about one aspect of the American character: the capacity to withstand a great deal of outside interference, so to speak; a willing acceptance of frenzy which though it's never self-conscious, amounts o a willingness to let other people have and assert their own lively, and even offensive, character. They are a tough race in this. — Alistair Cooke

Want me to roll you?" Tom asked. "Not funny." But Prophet was rock hard. Tom stalking over to him and crowding him wasn't helping. "You still have that duct tape?" "Yeah. Why?" "Come on, bebe. Let's play gator." Prophet hated the way his body responded yes - eagerly - to that question. "Think you wanna. 'M'I wrong?" Tom's drawl was thick as hell, went right down Prophet's spine, as the man's hand snaked around Prophet's waist and pushed his own hard cock against Prophet's cargo pant-clad one. "Yes. — S.E. Jakes

One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another. — Blaise Pascal

On not crowding another person in a relationship: Next time you're at a cemetary, look around at all the headstones. They're side by side. Even married couples. Nobody wants a plot on top of another person's plot. Why? ... Even when they're dead, people still love their own space. — Kristen Tracy

There's no space for wildlife; the humans are crowding them out. — Patrick Bergin

I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "maneater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded. — Carl Jung

The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there's a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under. — C.S. Lewis

Old Prague was a story-book city caked in grime: ancient, soot-blackened. History lived in every detail: in the deerstalker rooftops and the blue-sparking trams. He wandered the streets in disbelief, photographing everything, images from Kafka crowding into his head. With the turn of every corner it came back to him: the special frisson you get behind enemy lines. — Philip Sington

This then will be the shape and the feel of the world: an abandoned shell, signs of old life, curious animals wandering in and out of ruins, the wilderness crowding in, overtaking all human structures and human things. — Ben H. Winters

They're at the gates now, and there's no lock on them that Parks can see, but they don't open. Used to be electric, obviously, but bygones are bygones and in the brave new post-mortem world that just means they don't bloody work. "Over!" he yells. "Up and over!" Which is easily said. A head-high rampart of ornamental ironwork with functional spear points on top says different. They try, all the same. Parks leaves them to it, turns his back to them and goes on firing. The up side is that now he can be indiscriminate. Set to full auto and aim low. Cut the hungries' legs out from under them, turning the front-runners into trip hazards to slow the ones behind. The down side is that more and more of them keep coming. The noise is like a dinner bell. Hungries are crowding into the green space from the streets on every side, at what you'd have to call a dead run. There's no limit to their numbers, and there is a limit to his ammo. Which — M.R. Carey

Goosekit shook his head stubbornly. There were pictures crowding into his head, as clearly as if they were right in front of him. "There will be a badger," he insisted, "and Stormpaw will leave me to fight it on my own. — Erin Hunter

Merlin, do you mind?' It was the King who asked me, a man as old and wise as myself; a man who could see past his own crowding problems, and guess what it might men to me, to walk in dead air where once the world had been a god-filled garden. — Mary Stewart

The dragonets found the carpenters to be even more fascinating than the furniture, and followed the poor men from pen to pen, crowding around to watch, tasting the wooden planks, trying to steal the tools. It made for an interesting day for everyone, as the boys tried to keep the dragonets away from the carpenters, and the dragonets tried to get at the carpenters, and the carpenters worked probably a great deal faster than they ever had in their lives, sure that the dragonets would go from tasting the wood to tasting them. — Mercedes Lackey

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural loving and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? — Herman Melville

What no one tells you about having children is that it isn't tbe physical demand thry make in your life that affects your art, it's the emotional space they fill, crowding out your art. So even when you have the time to work, you're still mentally occupied. — Whitney Otto

WITH FAMILIAR AND EXOTIC PRODUCE CROWDING THE SUPERMARKET SHELVES FROM JANUARY TO December and farmers' markets making a comeback throughout the country, it may — Anonymous

running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors. The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper. "Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing — Edith Wharton

(The Mona Lisa), that really is the ugliest portrait I've seen, the only thing that supposedly makes it famous is the mystery behind it, Katherine admitted as she remembered her trips to the Louvre and how she shook her head at the poor tourists crowding around to see a jaundiced, eyebrow-less lady that reminded her of tight-lipped Washington on the dollar bill. Surely, they could have chosen a better portrait of the First President for their currency? — E.A. Bucchianeri

China is able to feed 23 percent of the world's population from 7 percent of the arable land - "by crowding some 2,000 human beings onto each square mile of cultivated earth in the valleys and flood plains," as Fairbank points out. — Robert D. Kaplan

Then she turns to Midnight and perches delicately on his lowered back. He rises, arches his neck, and carries Marlena from the big top. The rest of the horses follow, once again grouped by color, crowding each other to stay close to their mistress. — Sara Gruen

My lovers suffocate me! Crowding my lips, and thick in the pores of my skin, Jostling me through streets and public halls ... coming naked to me at night, Crying by day Ahoy from the rocks of the river ... swinging and chirping over my head, Calling my name from flowerbeds or vines or tangled underbrush, Or while I swim in the bath ... or drink from the pump on the corner ... or the curtain is down at the opera ... or I glimpse at a woman's face in the railroad car; Lighting on every moment of my life, Bussing my body with soft and balsamic busses, Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine — Walt Whitman

Suddenly there were all sorts of words crowding on Zane's tongue, and he couldn't get a single one out, much less three that would prove he knew the best thing to happen to him in his entire life lay right there in his arms. — Abigail Roux

I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand feet for the base.
And it has advantages. The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson sphere. We can spin it on its axis for gravity. A rotation speed of 770 m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal. We wouldn't even need to roof it over. Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the sun. Very little air will leak over the edges.
Lord knows the thing is roomy enough. With three million times the surface area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding. — Larry Niven

What the hell was I drinking last night? asked Shadow. The events of the night were crowding around him now, without shape, without sense, but he knew they were there. — Neil Gaiman

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen's faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs. — Joe Biden

During the socialist period, the government became too big. That created a crowding-out effect in the private economy, and it gave everybody the need to pay more taxes in order to finance this big government. We are against big government. We want a smaller and more efficient government. — Antonis Samaras

She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn't let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil. — Ian McEwan

Arafat had said that the womb of the Palestinian woman was a "biological weapon," which he could use to create Palestine state by crowding people into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. — Yasser Arafat

The girl's face hollowed with resignation; it had been a long time, but Sonja remembered what it was to have that face, what it was to feel you were no brighter than the dumbest man, no stronger than the weakest boy, and with those ideas crowding your head no wonder subordination was the only inevitable outcome. — Anthony Marra

I stared blankly at Rhys for what felt like about three days.
"Me?" I finally sputtered.
He nodded.
"You're kidding, right?"
"Not kidding."
I laughed then, and it sounded slightly hysterical. "I'm not
going to marry you."
"I'm not asking you to."
"Good."
He eyed me. "And you can wipe that horrified look off your
face because it's obviously not true."
"Do I look horrified?"
"Yes, you do."
I grimaced. "Nothing personal, Rhys, but - "
He held up a hand. "Say nothing else. I shouldn't have even
mentioned it to you. I'll find another dragon to help me."
"Second opinions are really important," I said.
He just glowered at that.
We rode the rest of the way back to Erin Heights in silence.
Now I had even more information crowding my already full brain.
Maybe that Irena chick should go see a shrink, herself. She was
one crazy dragon lady. — Michelle Rowen

Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding,Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West,That fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding,Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest? — Robert Bridges

One can live for years sometimes without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into one single hour. — Oscar Wilde

The modern world has far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn. People forgot that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it and be thankful for it. And by crowding things together they lost the sense of surprise; and surprise is the secret of joy. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

The curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities. — Gertrude Atherton