Gawped Quotes & Sayings

One thing in our favor: some of this "becoming kinder" happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish - how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we're not separate, and don't want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was "mostly Love, now. — George Saunders

To give up a marriage - someone unmarried might imagine it's like giving up a seat in a theater, or sacrificing a trick in bridge for the possibility of better, later. But it is harsher than anyone could realize: a hot invisible fire, burning pieces of hope and fantasy, and charred bits of the past. It had to go, however, if something were to be built in its place. So I stood there and gave Buzz advice, and all I could think of were the automatons we had seen at Playland, moving beautifully in the wind, and the children who were taken behind the scenes on a tour and shown, to their surprise, the vast tangle of wires and switches that would be so hard to undo, and even worse, once undone, to bring to life again. — Andrew Sean Greer

This matter is best disposed of from a great height, over water. — Ernest Lehman

Detective Inspector Carver took a picture from the breast pocket of his suit. He handed it to me. 'This is what you did, Michael. Take a good look. See if it jogs your memory.'
I gawped at the mutilated corpse of a naked young girl lying on a blood-soaked double bed. Her hands were bound to the brass headboard with duct tape. Blood covered her upper body, and her long blonde hair was streaked a murderous shade of red. One eye stared at the ceiling as if searching for salvation, the other, a bloody unrecognisable pulp, bore no relation to its sightless counterpart.
'Carla Marie Coombs. Twenty-one years of age. Do you recognise her, Michael? — Mark Tilbury

If you listed all the reasons for your faith, and all the things that make you cry, it would be essentially the same list. — Robert Breault

What created your outer is your inner — Joe Vitale

I don't record (any type of genre of music) that I didn't hear in my family's living room by the time I was 10. It just is my rule that I don't break because ... I can't do it authentically ... I really think that you're just hard-wiring (synapses) in your brain up until the age of maybe 12 or 10, and there are certain things you can't learn in an authentic way after that. — Linda Ronstadt

It's a beautiful book [Into the Forest], so for those who are thinking about reading it, they absolutely should. First and foremost, I just devoured it, as a story. At that time, and still, it just encompassed a lot of things that I was thinking about, and that the world is thinking about, with society's relationship to the environment, our personal relationship to it, and how disconnected we are from it, myself included. — Ellen Page

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that! — Lewis Carroll

Well, that is the oddest way to run a government I have ever heard of," September said stubbornly. "It's just absurd to elect a leader with a race or a chase or a hunt for a heart!" "What's an 'elect'?" asked Hushnow, the Ancient and Demented Raven Lord. "It's how we decide who's in charge where I come from. Everyone in the whole country votes for the President and the man who gets the most votes wins." A chorus of gasps went up from the club. Madame Tanaquill held a handkerchief over her mouth. "That's ghastly!" cried the Hushnow, the Ancient and Demented Raven Lord. "What if everyone chooses the wrong man?" gawped Pinecrack. "And if it's always a man and never a moose or an octopus or a spriggan I think that's just obscene, and prejudiced, and you ought to leave right now." September frowned. "Well, sometimes people do. But it's only for a few years, and then there's another election." The Rex Tyrannosaur looked nauseous. "Quite, quite horrid," he whispered. — Catherynne M Valente

and it seemed to me that we was like seafarers, and the tober was the ocean. We was passing the landlubbers by. We gawped at each other, us from our ships, and them from their shores, but the gap between us was so big we couldn't cross it. It was high tide or low tide, or whatever tide would prevent us from dropping anchor and rowing out to them, to exchange gifts and brides, gods and diseases" Outside Boy pg.55 — Jeanine Cummins

I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them. — Salman Rushdie