Quotes & Sayings About Experiencing The World

The world is going to be less biologically rich for quite some time in the future. We are always weeping that we live in such a diminished world, but we are experiencing a biologically rich world compared to what the future will look like. Bearing witness to that is a beautiful gift. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

The process of experiencing is well described by Goethe when he says that our life is made up of our connections with the world about us, and that we must each spin our own web and sit at the centre to catch what we can.[21] The web itself is made up of past experiences, and each new connection with the world about us, in so far as it is fully known and understood, is an addition to that web, and so an added means of experiencing. — Michael Oakeshott

To be worth making at all a journey has to be made in the mind as much as in the world of objects and dimensions. What value can there be in seeing or experiencing anything for the first time unless it comes as a revelation? And for that to happen, some previously held thought or belief must be confounded, or enhanced, or even transcended. What difference can it make otherwise to see a redwood tree, a tiger, or a humming bird? — Ted Simon

Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity. — Jose Saramago

The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.
Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the thought of one's love of God, but the act of experiencing the oneness with God. — Erich Fromm

Our civilization is experiencing unprecedented changes across many realms, largely due to the rapid advancement of information technology. The ability to code and understand the power of computing is crucial to success in today's hyper-connected world. — Al Gore

This is the real world, and only a believer walking in fellowship with His Creator and Redeemer can understand it. Everyone else is the world is experiencing a 'break with reality'. — Jim Berg

We join with all in experiencing the all-inclusiveness of the family of God, where no brother or sister is seen as separate or apart from the Whole of God. Our hearts are filled with Love and gratitude for our Relationship in God. We are glad that this joy is not dependent on where bodies seem to be or whether or not they seem to be together. We are created by a Pure Idea, and we are like our Source. We are Spirit as God is Spirit, and we are overflowing with thankfulness that this truth is dawning as the Mind we share. Our walk together is for the Purpose of accepting our Divine Source and laying aside all thought of the world as the source of anything. — David Hoffmeister

Tess is not simply presented as a passive victim, however. Throughout the novel she is shown as experiencing tension between the intractable materiality of the social and economic world in which she has to live, and her extraordinarily vulnerable, sensitive self. Hardy is particularly interested in the nature of her consciousness, and in the intense subjectivity of her experience. — Geoffrey Harvey

I know when I sit with my band members and we're playing back a song that we've done, I know that they're experiencing it in a completely different way and hearing stuff that they're alerted to because the way the interpret the world is through their ears. Mine is through my eyes. — Nick Cave

We all have insecurities, and the thing that makes them crippling is that we all have the ability to blow them up into such huge issues in our minds, that we might as well have a facial deformity. It keeps us from really going out there and living our lives, and forgetting about hating yourself and just experiencing the world around you. — Christina Ricci

When the institutions of money rule the world, it is perhaps inevitable that the interests of money will take precedence over the interests of people. What we are experiencing might best be described as a case of money colonizing life. To accept this absurd distortion of human institutions and purpose should be considered nothing less than an act of collective, suicidal insanity. — David Korten

I've been around the world and I've had bras made in different places, and each time I'm experiencing the same troubles: the painful shoulders, the underwire cutting into my flesh. — Jill Scott

Life is like an iceberg. Ninety percent is under the water, invisible to the naked eye. The only way to understand the supernatural world is through the Bible. I don't know how I existed without knowing God, or living in His love 24/7, or experiencing His peace no matter what the circumstances, or gaining His wisdom in all of life's choices. I can honestly say I now have no fear of lack, sickness, or even death. — Sid Roth

Romans 8:16 tells us that the Spirit bears witness to our hearts that we are children of God. Part of the mission of the Spirit is to tell you about God's love for you, his delight in you, and the fact that you are his child. These things you may know in your head, but the Holy Spirit makes them a fiery reality in your life. Thomas Goodwin, a seventeenth-century Puritan pastor, wrote that one day he saw a father and son walking along the street. Suddenly the father swept the son up into his arms and hugged him and kissed him and told the boy he loved him - and then after a minute he put the boy back down. Was the little boy more a son in the father's arms than he was down on the street? Objectively and legally, there was no difference, but subjectively and experientially, there was all the difference in the world. In his father's arms, the boy was experiencing his sonship. — Timothy Keller

The outside world can only trigger or block your experience of your true nature. Each time something beautiful takes your breath away, that's you experiencing yourself. Each time you fall in love with someone, that's you experiencing yourself. Each time a child's smile gives you unspeakable joy, that's you experiencing yourself. Your true nature is beautiful. Life is the art of rediscovering yourself, again and again, in different forms, celebrating, rejoicing, welcoming. You are beautiful. You are life itself. — Vironika Tugaleva

I travel around the world, experiencing every language, every religion ... some places where there's just no reason to smile, because their lives are so difficult. — Lionel Richie

We are beginning to learn that an empathic moment requires both intimate engagement and a measure of detachment. If our feelings completely spill over into another's feelings or their feelings overwhelm our psyche, we lose a sense of self and the ability to imagine the other as if they were us. Empathy is a difficult balancing act. One has to be open to experiencing another's plight as if it were one's own but not be engulfed by it, at the expense of drowning out the self's ability to be a unique and separate being. Empathy requires a porous boundary between I and thou that allows the identity of two beings to mingle in a shared mental space.
- The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis — Jeremy Rifkin

Writing is a way of life. I do it because it's a way of experiencing the world, and trying to come to terms with it and understand it and express it and engage with it. And to me it's a natural extension of reading. — Emily Perkins

I believe one of the important differences between creating literature and just telling a story around the campfire is that in literature you're recreating the experience of life, not just relaying a 'this happened, then that happened' kind of narrative. The specific details and layers of depth that make the world of the story - and what the character is experiencing in that world - as real as possible are elements I love as a reader and, consequently, elements I strive to use effectively as a writer. — Lara Campbell McGehee

The world has been experiencing a whole pattern of auto-destruction, whether in environmental disasters like Chernobyl or health disasters like AIDS. — Niki De St. Phalle

In the context of the autism world (and my outlook in general) this is were I stand equality is for everyone, everybody in the world - I look at both sides of the the coin and take into account peoples realities (that makes me neutral/moderate/in the middle).
That means that you look in a more three dimensional perspective of peoples diverse realities you cannot speak for all but one can learn from EACH OTHER through listening and experiencing.
I also try my best to live with the good cards I was given not over-investing in my autism being the defining factor of my being (but having a healthy acknowledgement of it) that it's there but also thinking about other qualities I have such as being a writer, poet and artist.
I do have disability, I do have autism and I have a "mild" learning disability that is true but I a human being first and foremost. And for someone to be seen as person equal to everyone else is a basic human right. — Paul Isaacs

Being a journalist seemed the ideal way of both having a job and experiencing the world, especially for anyone with a sense of adventure. — Jackie Kennedy

Life is holy and it is for all of us. God's design, I cannot understand myself and I never will, but I do know that what we are experiencing now will pass and in the end we will all be brothers, not just blood brothers, as we are, but brothers in spirit. Neither you nor I can change the world or human nature and we can only aim at changing attitudes - and perhaps teach those who have so much to give a portion of their blessings to those who have less. — F. Sionil Jose

It's not perfect, but nothing is perfect except for an idea of something," he goes on, "And if we aren't experiencing the world and all we do is think about our idea of the world, then why bother with any of it? — Autumn Doughton

I would die if I had to be confined. I don't want to feel that I'm missing out on experiencing as much as I can. For me, experiencing is knowing people all over the world and being able to photograph. — Mary Ellen Mark

The Jedi is a practitioner of mind mastery. He realizes that whatever they are experiencing, they are creating and that they can change their lives in an instant by changing their thoughts, their focus and the way they are observing and engaging the energy of the world around them and the people who they've invited into their lives to play whatever roles they've chosen them to play. — Stephen Richards

Europe today is the most secular region in the world. Europe is the only region in the world experiencing population decline. Wherever you turn today the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families. — Jonathan Sacks

Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self. — Jane Hirshfield

The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world. — Sidney Jourard

At this very moment we are experiencing the consequences of man-made climate change. They are dramatic. However, opinion polls indicate that the people of this world are not particularly concerned. One — Jostein Gaarder

How, in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing life? These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that really ineffable mystery that is just the existence, the being of ourselves and of our world. If we give that mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real depth. But when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make ... — Joseph Campbell

A man driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and loneliness; or another one driven by ambition, or greed for money. In all these cases the person is the slave of a passion, and his activity is in reality a "passivity" because he is driven; he is the sufferer, not the "actor." On the other hand, a man sitting quiet and contemplating, with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his oneness with the world, is considered to be "passive," because he is not "doing" anything. — Erich Fromm

No one, no single center, can today command the world. No single group of countries can do it. Under the current U.S. president, I don't think we can fundamentally change the situation as it is developing now. It is dangerous. The world is experiencing a period of growing global disarray. — Mikhail Gorbachev

Thomas Goodwin, a seventeenth-century Puritan pastor, wrote that one day he saw a father and son walking along the street. Suddenly the father swept the son up into his arms and hugged him and kissed him and told the boy he loved him - and then after a minute he put the boy back down. Was the little boy more a son in the father's arms than he was down on the street? Objectively and legally, there was no difference, but subjectively and experientially, there was all the difference in the world. In his father's arms, the boy was experiencing his sonship. When — Timothy J. Keller

Despite the feeling that we're directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of this book in your hands, the light in the room, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking. — David Eagleman

The major impediment to experiencing the sacred depths of ordinary moments is the speed and distraction of contemporary life that moves to the imperatives of the global economic order.In addition, we increasingly live in a virtual world in which our reality is filtered through media and information technology. — Sam Keen

What you end up experiencing is really a personal presentation of the world according to you, rather than the stark, unfiltered experience of what is really out there. This mental manipulation of the outer experience allows you to buffer reality as it comes in. — Michael Singer

Can one be fully human without experiencing tragedy? The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that. — Anthony De Mello

However, science, by its very nature, forms its own inherent boundaries to man's progress. . . Focused as it is on the world out there, categorizing and measuring, theorizing and concluding all things based on external evidence and proof, science misses the core of life: the consciousness doing the experiencing. — Thomas Daniel Nehrer

[I]t would seem that to be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full. For one does not know the world simply in thinking about it and doing about it. One must first experience it more directly, and prolong the experience without jumping to conclusions. — Alan W. Watts

There were other refugees around him experiencing the same fears and helplessness, but Litvinoff didn't find any comfort in this because there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone. Litvinoff preferred to be alone. — Nicole Krauss

The paradox of the modern world is this: Not only do we do less, physically, than ever before, but we also almost never do nothing. Our bodies, deprived of large movements, are inundated with subtle-yet-continuous physical stimulation from noise, light, data, etc. This constant stream of input is a two-fold stressor, as not only is the frequency of certain environmentally induced loads extremely high, the types of input we are experiencing are unnatural. — Katy Bowman

One does not realize the historical sensation as a re-experiencing, but as an understanding that is closely related to the understanding of music, or rather of the world by means of music. — Johan Huizinga

If we can observe and understand how our thoughts are impacting us, we can change who we're being and how we're experiencing the world. — Lori Deschene

Many Sages have said, "Your world is a dream. You're living in an illusion." They're referring to this world of the mind and the way we believe our thoughts about reality. When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. — Adyashanti

I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra. — Galen Rowell

We learn to understand ourselves in and through it because the artwork is not a timeless present for a pure aesthetic consciousness (i.e., it is not an encounter with an object for which one can only express feelings of pleasure or displeasure), but rather, a real encounter with a world that presents itself historically. The self-understanding that occurs in relation to the experience of art, Gadamer tells us, is only possible when our experiencing is not discontinuous with "the unity and integrity of the other."17 — James Risser

Journalism was for me more than a business or a profession. It was a way of living, of experiencing the world even as I instantly distanced myself from it, in order to recreate what I'd witnessed for the public. — Andrea Mitchell

This is the picture of Jesus in the gospel. He is something - someone - worth losing everything for. And if we walk away from the Jesus of the gospel, we walk away from eternal riches. The cost of nondiscipleship is profoundly greater for us than the cost of discipleship. For when we abandon the trinkets of this world and respond to the radical invitation of Jesus, we discover the infinite treasure of knowing and experiencing him. — David Platt

We all suffer ills at the hands of others; however, reactions to these injustices differ like night and day. Many seek to punish the world for their suffering, but some work hard to save the world from experiencing similar grief. — Richelle E. Goodrich

In order to engage in an 'experiencing of the world,' one has to physically move oneself to the most diverse places on earth. — Wolfgang Tillmans

You say that I am living in illusion. But poverty, work, war, they are not illusions. Are they? In what sense am I being deluded? What you experience through your separative consciousness is an illusion. You can't say that falling bombs are an illusion. It is not an illusion, only your experience of it is an illusion. The reality of the world that you are experiencing now is an illusion. That is all I am trying to say. If you say that — U.G. Krishnamurti

Emotions - Happiness, anger, jealousy ... is the mind experiencing "presence" in our holographic existence. — Clyde DeSouza

Compassion literally means to feel with, to suffer with. Everyone is capable of compassion, and yet everyone tends to avoid it because it's uncomfortable. And the avoidance produces psychic numbing - resistance to experiencing our pain for the world and other beings. — Joanna Macy

The end is not near. The end is not here. What the world is experiencing is not the end — The Prophet Of Life

It is, she considered gravely, a terribly dangerous world. She supposed it always had been, but she was only now really experiencing it. — S.D. Smith

The kids filed quietly to the edge of the strip to wait for the helicopters. Other Marines stopped to watch them, wanting to say an encouraging word yet not daring to break into their private world - a world no longer shared with ordinary people. Some of them were experiencing the last hour of that brief mystery called life. — Karl Marlantes

Shortage of time is not your problem. Shortage of money is not your problem. Shortage of Connection to the Energy that creates worlds is at the heart of all sensations of shortage that you are experiencing. — Esther Hicks

Being a human being is all about experiencing all of the wonders of the world and therefore as an actress, I'm open to any opportunity that may enrich my horizon. — Sarah Polley

We'll never know our full potential unless we push ourselves to find it. — Travis Rice

I don't own designer clothes, or a sports car, or a huge house, but I am seeing the world, experiencing amazing things, and I have become an environmental campaigner. — Roz Savage

Though she isn't stupid at all. "Wow, other people are mastering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can't seem to learn to think in this manner." 5. Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called "relative deprivation," a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War. Stouffer was commissioned by the U.S. Army to examine the attitudes and morale of American soldiers, and he ended up studying half a million men and women, looking at everything from how soldiers viewed their commanding officers to how black soldiers felt they were being treated to how difficult soldiers found it to serve in isolated outposts. But one set of questions Stouffer asked stood out. He quizzed both — Malcolm Gladwell

In the yoga sutras, they have this beautiful analogy that the journey of life is like the flight of an eagle, or the journey over multiple lifetimes is like a flight of an eagle. First, the eagle stretches its wings high, high, high, and experiences everything that the world has to offer in terms of flight. It's growing and flying and it's experiencing, and then it brings its wings down gracefully and that is the completion of the journey. — Karan Bajaj

The spectrum that most people exist in this world is very mundane and very unhappy. Certainly human beings are capable of experiencing great joy and happiness. — Frederick Lenz

It is important to get connected to your soul. There are motivational thoughts that bring eternal peace and integrity. The life then gives an outlook of spiritual awareness about one's self and the world. A self-learned lesson can be helpful in terms of experiencing the intensity of positive thoughts. — Robert Jordan

Women make up half the world; and I thought I had reached the stage where there was nothing in a woman's nakedness to surprise me. But I felt now as if I was experiencing anew, and seeing a woman for the first time. — V.S. Naipaul

Are we all not knights and ladies of the road?
For all the world's our territory,
We have our exits and entrances,
Experiencing both rejection and acceptance,
And each in his time
Must joust with one
To advance to the other. — Ronald Solberg

Happiness can't be reduced to a few agreeable sensations. Rather, it is a way of being and of experiencing the world - a profound fulfillment that suffuses every moment and endures despite inevitable setbacks. — Matthieu Ricard

Technology has altered the way music sounds, how it's composed and how we experience it. It has also flooded the world with music. The world is awash with (mostly) recorded sounds. We used to have to pay for music or make it ourselves; playing, hearing and experiencing it was exceptional, a rare and special experience. Now hearing it is ubiquitous, and silence is the rarity that we pay for and savor. — David Byrne

When you're in your 20s, you're a little more carefree; you're single. You have a very different way of looking at the world and experiencing the world. But later in your 30s, when you have children, a career, career obstacles, mortgages, car payments and relationships, you have to negotiate; that's a very different life. — Melissa De Sousa

Relationships without a Divine Aim always "break up," for they are based on nothing. Divine Purpose could be described as forgiveness -- the undoing and releasing of the ego. Belief in the ego prevents awareness of True Union and Intimacy. The underlying fear of Intimacy and Union is the ego's fear of loss of itself, the 'personal self' and the 'personal world. — David Hoffmeister

Sometimes you can save someone's whole world just by smiling at them. Kindness is one of those things that has immense value to the person experiencing it. — Debra Anastasia

This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart. — Bill Hicks

living means experiencing the world with your mind. — Dima Zales

Sharing our personal stories makes us grateful for experiencing the radiance of being alive. Writing our personal stories documenting our vivid encounters with the larger world and examining our own time-tested ideas shapes the conception of our own being. — Kilroy J. Oldster

To the degree you have experienced intimacy with God, you won't be afraid of death because you're experiencing the first tastes and promises of heaven in this world. — Richard Rohr

When I read poetry, I want to feel myself suddenly larger ... in touch with - or at least close to - what I deem magical, astonishing. I want to experience a kind of wonderment. And when you report back to your own daily world after experiencing the strangeness of a world sort of recombined and reordered in the depths of a poet's soul, the world looks fresher somehow. Your daily world has been taken out of context. It has the voice of the poet written all over it, for one thing, but it also seems suddenly more alive ... — Mark Strand

How else could people exist in a world of good and evil, where wicked atrocities abound in backyards, yet somehow still be capable of experiencing joy and love? Surely Darius was not the only survivor of evil, not the only one who longed to see good in the world. He had just focused on the wrong thing, allowing it to consume him. — Madison Thorne Grey

It [music] has an awakening function. Life is a rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms. Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it's an awakener of life. — Joseph Campbell

When you're close to somebody, you can never really know how they're experiencing the world. — Spike Jonze

Discipleship requires at least three things of us: first, coming to love the Lord more than we love anything in the world; second, experiencing a change of heart so that we have no "disposition to do evil, but to do good continually"57 - which doesn't mean we no longer make mistakes, it just means we don't want to; and third, behaving like true followers. — Sheri Dew

There is not a living man who does not wish to play the despot when he is stiff: it seems to him his joy is less when others appear to have as much fun as he; by an impulse of pride, very natural at this juncture, he would like to be the only one in the world capable of experiencing what he feels: the idea of seeing another enjoy as he enjoys reduces him to a kind of equality with that other, which impairs the unspeakable charm despotism causes him to feel. — Marquis De Sade

True love is real. Sadly only few will ever have the joy in experiencing it. If you have the opportunity to be able to share your life with the one person that makes you most alive, most comforted, most happy, do not pass up the opportunity
for anything in the world. You may be passing up one of the best experiences of your life. It may be the one you desire, or it may be the one that desires you. Sometimes the best couples comes from the most unlikely of pairs. You may be passing up the opportunity on joining with the other half that will make you whole. Love is a risk, but a risk worth taking. — Kenneth G. Ortiz

Children learn from the world through doing, touching, experiencing; adults on the other hand, tend to take in the world through their heads - reading books, watching television, swiping at touch screens. They're estranged from the world of everyday objects. Yet interacting with the world is fundamental to who we are. — Jennifer Senior

What happened was that sometimes I was, from a young age, put in the theater to watch movies because they kept me quiet and they kept me entertained, and they got me out from under the feet of my parents. So from a very early age, I went to the movies and I soon grew to prefer the life of the movies to my own life. The reality that the movies offered was preferable to the reality that I was experiencing. I became a child movie addict. I would go in with great pleasure and I'd never look at what was playing
what was playing was unimportant. The fact was that I was entering a new world, an environment where not only was it much more attractive than my life was ordinarily, but also I could manipulate it to an extent by coming and going, and by looking at scenes or not, which I could not in my own life. I was subjected to my own domestic life. But I discovered a kind of power at the movies. — Donald Richie

Lord, I can approach you only by means of my consciousness, but consciousness can only approach you as an object, which you are not. I have no hope of experiencing you as I experience the world - directly, immediately - yet I want nothing more. — Christian Wiman

Ya know it's funny, what's happening to us. Our lives have become digital. Our friends, now virtual. And, anything you could ever wanna know is just a click away. Experiencing the world through second hand information isn't enough. If we want authenticity we have to initiate it. We will never know our full potential unless we push ourselves to find it. It's this self-discovery that inevitably takes us to the wildest places on earth. — Travis Rice

After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.
Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom. — Saul Bellow

The loss of letters in today's world is one of the great losses we are experiencing, though we shan't know the full extent of it for another twenty or thirty years when we'll wish we had those letters never written. — David Burnett

Like everyone else in the world, I've been devastated by the loss and suffering of so many in South Asia ... As a mother, I cannot imagine the pain that they are experiencing. We can all see that it's going to take a long time for those people to rebuild their lives, and they will need our help for years to come. — Celine Dion

When we can't determine what is art - when you get to that point where we're not sure, that's the greatest likelihood that we're actually experiencing something great. But I think that's what the art world is most afraid of, because you lose that security. Then we don't know how to assign evaluation, whether it's cultural or otherwise. — Richard Phillips

For me, travelling and drawing the world, experiencing as much as possible first hand, has been very important. Making notes, drawing and writing on the move, became second nature. — Michael Foreman

It perplexes me how many people write books where everyone comes from the same basic set of backgrounds - middle class, white, straight, etc. It's like writing a book set in a world without coincidences, accidents, and colors. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? It reduces drama and conflicts and narrows the possible variety of points of view. And really, the whole magic of books is to show us the world through someone else's eyes. Experiencing the Other is what novels are for. — Scott Westerfeld

As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world. — Mark Leyner

Even after two days, I can see that there are so many sides to him ... There's times he exudes such strength that it threatens to knock me flat ... Those are the times that I do believe he is an angel, that I do believe he guards us as he says he does. Then there are his other sides, most specifically when he seems unsure, hesitant ... His wonder is almost childlike in its mien. He sees things I no longer can because it is as if he's experiencing everything for the first time ... And then there's the darker part of him. I will send you and yours into the black. I don't want to think about that part. I don't want to know what "the black" is. It's only been two days since he fell from the sky, but those two days have shown just how little I really know about the world. — T.J. Klune

I am now experiencing perfect health, abundant prosperity and complete and utter happiness. This is true because the world is full of charming people who now lovingly help me in every way. I am now coming into an innumerable company of angels. I am now living a delightful, interesting and satisfying life of the most widely useful kind. Because of my own increased health, wealth and happiness, I am now able to help others live a delightful, interesting and satisfying life of the most widely useful kind, my good - our good - is universal. — Catherine Ponder

The world isn't ending. You are just experiencing turbulence. The plane is safe. The pilot is good. You're in the right seat of life. You just hit a patch of bumpy air. Wait. It will pass. — Regina Brett

Learn to be happy in any and all circumstances, whether you're experiencing pleasure or pain, whether there's loss or gain, whether the world loves you or hates you. Learn to be happy. — Frederick Lenz

The modern world lies under a pervasive sense of anguish, of being abandoned, or at least experiencing God as absent. Yet events that seem to turn our lives upside down and inside out are part of God's redemptive plan, not only for us, but for the world in which we live. God may be preparing a great awakening for the world, if God can find enough people to cooperate in this mysterious plan. — Thomas Keating