Quotes & Sayings About Grains Of Sand

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened. — Jorge Luis Borges

They defended the grains of sand in the desert to the last drop of their blood. — Gamal Abdel Nasser

Henry liked to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition, still please him. Even as a child, and especially after Aberfan, he never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god. — Ian McEwan

The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins. — Neal Stephenson

Many people believe that the grains of sand are infinite in multitude ... Others think that although their number is not without limit, no number can ever be named which will be greater than the number of grains of sand. But I shall try to prove to you that among the numbers which I have named there are those which exceed the number of grains in a heap of sand the size not only of the earth, but even of the universe — Archimedes

Time plays no role in the life of one man - the subtle consciousness of it floating past me is more than enough. Years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds - what does it matter? Floating by, it rubs against my skin, face, and hair - wearing me down, yet polishing me all the while. Time is like fine grains of sand in a desert storm. At first, you don't pay any attention to it, but the more it hits you in the face, the more aware of it you become, the more annoying it gets until, one day, you find yourself suffocating. The weight of it eventually bends your spine, until you are crawling on your hands and knees, unable to stand straight. Then comes the time to crawl back into the womb, crawl inside and wait for rebirth. — Henry Martin

To ache from the knowledge that I may never hold you again - to count the moments, like grains of sand, while we were parted only to escape the sky and find that you still only know me as a boy from school ... — Amy A. Bartol

JAMIE'S SONG 'WHERE YOU ARE':

I left my heart at your door,
Don't tread on it on your way out.
It's convulsing on the floor,
Can't you hear it scream and shout?

I dropped my life by your feet,
Don't kick it as you walk down the street.
I put my dreams in your hand,
Don't let them slip through your fingers like grains of sand.

And my eyes will watch you from afar,
Guide you like a shooting star.

And you'll see that I'll always be where you are.
Where you are.
Yes, you know that I'll always be where you are.

Yes my eyes will watch you from afar,
Guide you like a shooting star.
And you'll see that I'll always be where you are.
Where you are. — Neha Yazmin

These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but the sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold. — Leo Tolstoy

We dangle by a flimsy thread,
Our little lives are grains of sand:
The Cosmos is a tiny sphere
Held in the hollow of God's hand.
Give up your anger and your spite,
And imitate the Deer, the Tree;
In sweet Forgiveness find your joy,
For it alone can set you free. — Margaret Atwood

Mix salt and sand, and it shall puzzle the wisest of men, with his mere natural appliances, to separate all the grains of sand from all the grains of salt; but a shower of rain will effect the same object in ten minutes. — Thomas Huxley

The back-and-forth ancient lull of the tide. The cry of seagulls passing overhead. The smell of salt and fish carried on the warm breeze. With each step along the old wooden planks of the pier, tiny grains of sand that hitchhiked from the beach below are pulverized under our heels. Sand that traveled millions of miles over billions of years across shifting continents and churning oceans, surviving plate tectonics, erosion, and sedimentary deposition is crushed by our new sandals.
The cosmos can be cruel. — Sarah Ockler

Who can calculate the trajectory of a molecule? How do we know the creation of worlds is not determined by the falling of grains of sand? Who, after all, knows the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely big and the infinitely small, the reverberation of causes in the chasms of a being, the avalanches of creation? A — Victor Hugo

Just think! This whole world of ours is only a speck of mildew sprung up on a tiny planet, yet we think we can have something great - thoughts,, actions! They are all but grains of sand — Leo Tolstoy

If I stay, it's going to be in your bed."
Her pounding heart relaxed, the fear that he'd reject her floating away like tiny grains of sand in the wind. "I know."
"And we're not going to sleep."
"I'm good with that, too. — Robin Bielman

Have you seen the sand-roses of the Sahara? Such is the violence of the Khamsin that it whips grains of sand together, presses them, finally builds them into great blocks, big enough and solid enough to be used for walls in the oasis. And beautiful! Whew! For all that, they are not real rocks. Leave hem in peace, with no possible interference - what happens? (I brought some home, and put them "in safety" as curiosities, and as useful psychometrical tests.) Alas! Time is enough. Go to the drawer which held them; nothing remains but little piles of dust. — Aleister Crowley

I am the infinite sea, and all worlds are but grains of sand upon my shore. — Kahlil Gibran

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream? — Edgar Allan Poe

It's not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky. — Chuck Palahniuk

In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. [ ... ] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. [ ... ] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man. — Arthur C. Clarke

We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy-hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears. I — Doris Lessing

Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie. — Joanne Harris

The Hubbell space telescope, it's first year up after they fixed it, categorized and counted 500 billion galaxies in any one photograph field of view of dark matter. That's like grains of sand at the beach and you've just got a handful. It's massive amounts. I'm sure that of all of the galaxies, and I'm sure the universe is teeming with life. — Alex Jones

But germs are the most common snowflake starters and lie at the heart of 85 percent of all flakes.2
So next time you gaze at a lovely snowstorm, inform your favorite germophobe or hypochondriac that living bacteria sit shivering in most of those untold billions of flakes. Then hand him or her a snow cone or organize a catch-a-snowflake-on-your-tongue party.
Once the ice-forming process is started, more molecules join the party, and the crystal grows. It can ultimately become either a snowflake or a rough granule of ice called by the odd name graupel. A snowflake contains ten quintillion water molecules. That's ten million trillion. Ten snowflakes - which can fit on your thumb tip - have the same number of molecules as there are grains of sand on the earth. Or stars in the visible universe. How many flakes, how many molecules fashioned the snowy landscape I was observing as I drove east? It numbed the brain. — Bob Berman

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? — Richard Dawkins

Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass ... if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass ... slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own ... structure. — Dale Carnegie

This beach I voyage on leads me through the earth's immortal consistencies. Each form I encounter obeys the principles of perfection and trial, a timelessness in the making. The proportions of truth are at hand. Existence is celebrated in a splinter of driftwood, worn by wind-driven sand into the shape of an arrow. The onshore waves jostle each other, busy with their eternal changing, mixing crab shells, sand grains, and fish bones together. The trim little shorebirds feeding at the water's edge are acutely aware of one another, under the light and shadow leaning and drifting over all awareness. Wither own mysteries behind their beady eyes, their quick, advantageous movements, they follow the great, unifying sea." ~ John Hay. Bird of Light. — John Hay

The greatest mountain is still made of grains of sand. — Matshona Dhliwayo

There are times when Los Angeles is the most magical city on Earth. When the Santa Ana winds sweep through and the air is warm and so, so clear. When the jacaranda trees bloom in the most brilliant lilac violet. When the ocean sparkles on a warm February day and you're pushing fine grains of sand through your bare toes while the rest of the country is hunkered down under blankets slurping soup. But other times, like when the jacaranda trees drop their blossoms in an eerie purple rain, Los Angeles feels like only a half-formed dream. Like perhaps the city was founded as a strip mall in the early 1970s and has no real reason to exist. An afterthought from the designer of some other, better city. A playground made only for attractive people to eat expensive salads. — Steven Rowley

The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future. — Lord Acton

When I lie on the beach there naked, which I do sometimes, and I feel the wind coming over me and I see the stars up above and I am looking into this very deep, indescribable night, it is something that escapes my vocabulary to describe. Then I think: 'God, I have no importance. Whatever I do or don't do, or what anybody does, is not more important than the grains of sand that I am lying on, or the coconut that I am using for my pillow.' So I really don't think in the long sense. — Marlon Brando

A faerie heart is different from a human heart. Human hearts are elastic. They have room for all sorts of passions, and they can break and heal and love again and again. Faerie hearts are evolutionarily less sophisticated. They are small and hard, like tiny grains of sand. Our hearts are too small to love more than one person in a lifetime. — Jodi Lynn Anderson

A little tap on the window pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain. — Marcel Proust

Your existence is passing before you. Grains of sand in the hourglass. The Wicked Witch of the West has you in her castle and she's turned the hourglass over and the sand is running through. Will you be liberated or will you die? The only way you can beat death is liberation. — Frederick Lenz

There are more stars known to exist right now than the total number of all the grains of sand on every beach in the entire world. With those kinds of odds, it would seem downright naive for someone to go to a beach in, say, some out-of-the-way inlet in Baffin Bay, stoop to pick up only one tiny grain of sand, and declare that that grain alone was the only place where life could exist. — Hugh Downs

We are blessed to be tiny beings in this universe. We are blessed to feel momentous because we are larger than these grains of sand. — Anne Rice

An infant, in his first sleepiness, must let go of the world; a man must learn to die. What comes between are the grains of sand. Ambition. Loss. Envy. Desire. Hatred. Love. Tenderness. Joy. Shame. Loneliness. Ecstasy. Ache. Surrender. — Ethan Canin

You have more brain cells than there are grains of sand on your favorite beach, and you have cleverness, dexterity, and creativity - all of which powerfully combine when you are at risk - if you listen to your intuition — Gavin De Becker

A place where a clock's minute and hour hands spread away from its face, flapping like wings. A place where he'd pluck a daisy and watch the petals whirl like the propellers of a helicopter. Where he'd throw a handful of sand, and the grains would buzz away like a swarm of gnats. Where colorful fruits on a tree would burst into flight, and new ones would perch in their place. — Michelle Cuevas

If wishes were grains of sand, the world would be a desert. — Palle Oswald

She walks towards Karen and Karen feels a cool wind against her skin, and the grandmother holds out both of her knobby old hands, and Karen puts out her own hands and touches her, and her hands feel as if sand is falling over them. There's a smell of milkweed flowers and garden soil. The grandmother keeps on walking; her eyes are light blue, and her cheek comes against Karen's, cool grains of dry rice. Then she's like the dots on the comic page, close up, and then she's only a swirl in the air, and then she's gone. — Margaret Atwood

Where is my oasis? Too far from
here for me to crawl with these
dead legs, refusing to co-operate
Hands and fingers clawing uselessly
through the grains of sand ... — Kiera Woodhull

In a matter of a moment the amount of sand in the upper part of the hour-glass had dwindled dramatically, the tiny grains were rushing through the opening, each grain more eager to leave then the last, time is just like people, sometimes it's all it can do to drag itself along, but at others, it runs like a deer and leaps like a young goat, which, when you think about it, is not saying much, since the cheetah is the fastest of all the animals, and yet it has never occurred to anyone to say of another person He runs and jumps like a cheetah, perhaps because that first comparison comes from the magical late middle ages, when gentlemen went deer-hunting and no one had ever seen a cheetah running or even heard of its existence. Languages are conservative, they always carry their archives with them and hate having to be updated. — Jose Saramago

Happiness is a series of grains of sand spread out in a desert of violence and anguish. — Sebastien De Castell

The sand looked so beautiful then, so many little individual grains in the light of the night, giving the watcher the childhood feeling of infinite things finally understood, the humiliating feeling of the watcher's nothingness. — Ayi Kwei Armah

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials
I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered
it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. — Susan Vreeland

Imagine the ability to let go of everything. To step back from the expectations of life, let it all slip through your fingers as though none of it mattered. Your doubts, your fears, your weaknesses, all of them falling like grains of sand into the wind. It feels like freedom, but it's an illusion. — Pippa DaCosta

Time slips through our hands like grains of sand, never to return again. — Robin Sharma

...A person should only be judged on their own actions. That is the only thing they can control. Everything else...is no more important than these grains of sand. — M.K. Eidem

I'll tell you truly: I value my thought and work terribly, but in essence - think about it - this whole world of ours is just a bit of mildew that grew over a tiny planet. And we think we can have something great - thoughts, deeds! They're all grains of sand — Leo Tolstoy

Theunis Piersma and his colleagues in the 1990s showed how red knots were able to detect tiny immobile bivalves (like mussels and clams) hidden in sand. When the bird pushes its beak into wet sand it generates a pressure wave in the minute amounts of water lying between the sand grains. This pressure wave is disrupted by solid objects, such as bivalves, which block the flow of water, thereby creating a 'pressure disturbance' detectable by the bird. — Tim Birkhead

There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, pinhead eggs that become caterpillars that dissolve into genetic soup from which arise butterflies, that some hearts are dark and others full of light. — Dean Koontz

It's bright pinky-white sand was made entirely of shell dust, like star dust, among which, if you sifted it with your fingers, were infant shells as small as the grains but perfectly shaped. Scattered over the surface were larger shells of many kinds and shapes, some as delicate as flower petals, others, though small, built to withstand any battering sea. — L.M. Boston

I think a responsibility comes with notoriety, but I never think of it as power. It's more like something you hold, like grains of sand. If you keep your hand closed, you can have it and possess it, but if you open your fingers in any way, you can lose it just as quickly. — Diana Ross

Gratitude and Contentment is the greatest worker of miracles. It transforms water into wine, grains of sand into pearls, raindrops into balsam, poverty into wealth, the smallest into the greatest, the most common to the most noble, earth into paradise. — Kaspar Hauser

Nothing happened for a whole day. Then, in a little hollow on the edge of the brooding hill, a few grains of sand shifted and left a tiny hole.

Something emerged. Something invisible. Something joyful and selfish and marvellous. Something as intangible as an idea, which is exactly what it was. A wild idea.

It was old in a way not measurable by any calendar known to Man and what it had, right now, was memories and needs. It remembered life, in other times and other universes. It needed people.

It rose against the stars, changing shape, coiling like smoke.

There were lights on the horizon.

It liked lights.

It regarded them for a few seconds and then, like an invisible arrow, extended itself towards the city and sped away.

It liked action, too . . . — Terry Pratchett

He had scooped up another handful of sand and stared at each grain as it fell through his fingers. 'You are like these. Each a trifling speck. A hundred, many hundreds - what matter? Cast them into the air. You cannot even find them when they land upon the ground. But there are more grains than you can count. There is no end to them. You will pour across this land, and we will be smothered. Your stone walls, your dead trees, the hooves of your strange beasts trampling the clam beds. My uncle sees these things, here and now. And in his trance, he sees that worse is coming. You walls will rise everywhere until they shut us out. You will turn the land upside down with your ploughs until all the hunting grounds are gone. This, and more, my uncle sees. — Geraldine Brooks

Imagine all the people you meet in your life. There are so many. They come in like waves, trickling in and out with the tide. Some waves are much bigger and make more of an impact than others. Sometimes the waves bring with them things from deep in the bottom of the sea and they leave those things tossed onto the shore. Imprints against the grains of sand that prove the waves had once been there, long after the tide recedes. That was what Atlas was telling me when he said "I love you." He was letting me know that I was the biggest wave he'd ever come across. And I brought so much with me that my impressions would always be there, even when the tide rolled out. — Colleen Hoover

In a crowd we are "microbes" infecting everyone around us, a "grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will." We are impulsive, irritable, irrational: — Jon Ronson

How many ways have you thought of already?" "Who can count the number of stars in the sky or grains of sand upon the beach? It's futile. — Richelle Mead

I lifted my chin, meeting the eyes of the woman who'd become the living embodiment of my totem, my bright phoenix, and forged ahead. "But I live with the wrong choices, the paths untraveled, the lives lost, and I never hold those regrets against anyone but myself. So, if you have some reason that you think I'll regret getting in that car or not getting in that car, then tell me. Because I won't have anything between us, either." My mind flashed to an hourglass, grains of sand trickling away, carrying my life with them. "At least, nothing that we can avoid...like the fear of unspoken words. — Marie Castle

What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. On — Liu Cixin

Grains of sand will only flow with the winds, Kenton, never against them. — Brandon Sanderson

From a grain of sand in the Pearl comes. — Confucius

Now she realized that she was not peering at a so-dark-blue-it-looked-black ocean, but rather she was looking straight through miles of incredibly clear water at something enormous and black in its nethermost depths. Maybe it was the bottom
so deep that not even light could touch it.
And yet, down in those impossible depths, she thought she could see tiny lights sparkling. She stared uncertainly at the tiny glimmerings. They seemed almost like scattered grains of sand lit from within; in some places they clustered like colonies, faint and twinkling.
Like stars ... — Fuyumi Ono

We were right to come here, if only because the ocean reminded you that impossible things were possible. Miles and miles of the deepest waters that moved like clockwork were possible. Creatures like jellyfish and sea urchins were, too. Millions and jillions of the tiniest grains of sand to form one long, soft beach - yep, even that was possible. — Deb Caletti

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. — Liu Cixin

New York City is where specks of dust aspire randomly with all their cunning to become grains of sand. — David B. Lentz

Filled with hope, Ico looked into Yorda's eyes. He felt like was looking into an hourglass, trying to pick through the grains of sand for some truth buried there long ago. He hadn't found anything yet, but the warmth of Yorda's hands in his told him that he was getting close. — Miyuki Miyabe

We were fortunate his brief psychic vision distracted him from what his fingertips could have told him about my face.
Of course we were aware that temporary clairvoyance was a lame and unlikely explanation. The ordering of this world, however is so abstruce, so deep and complex, most explanations that people to make sense of moments of strange experience are inadequate. Our very existence as thinking creatures is an astonishment that cant be solved. Every human cell, with its thousands of protein chains, is more complex than a 747 or the largest cruise ship, in fact more complex than the two combined. All life on earth, in its extravagant variety, offers itself for study, but though we probe to ever deeper layers of its structure, the meaning eludes us.
There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. — Dean Koontz

The poem doesn't have stanzas, it has a body, the poem doesn't have lines,/ it has blood, the poem is not written with letters, it's written/ with grains of sand and kisses, petals and moments, shouts and/ uncertainties. — Jose Luis Peixoto

You tell me that class distinctions are baubles used by monarchs, I defy you to show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which distinctions have not existed. You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led. I would not say this in public, but in a assembly of wise statesmen it should be said. I don't think that the French love liberty and equality: the French are not changed by ten years of revolution: they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They have one feeling: honour. We must nourish that feeling. The people clamour for distinction. See how the crowd is awed by the medals and orders worn by foreign diplomats. We must recreate these distinctions. There has been too much tearing down; we must rebuild. A government exists, yes and power, but the nation itself - what is it? Scattered grains of sand. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Most people miss their whole lives, you know. Listen, life isn't when you are standing on top of a mountain looking at a sunset. Life isn't waiting at the alter or the moment your child is born or that time you were swimming in a deep water and a dolphin came up alongside you. These are fragments. 10 or 12 grains of sand spread throughout your entire existence. These are not life. Life is brushing your teeth or making a sandwich or watching the news or waiting for the bus. Or walking. Every day, thousands of tiny events happen and if you're not watching, if you're not careful, if you don't capture them and make them COUNT, your could miss it. You could miss your whole life. — Toni Jordan

I don't want to sit on the sidelines and not value the gift of being here. Instead of the idea of time ticking away, the grains of sand running out, I try to think of time as giving me another grain of sand, another gift. So time passing is an accumulation, rather than a diminishing. — Tori Amos

Depending on which biologist you speak to, between thirty-six and forty total phyla are recognized on our planet. Rainforests, our flagships of biodiversity, are known to contain sixteen phyla. The spaces in between sand grains are home to twenty-two. — Michael Welland

I've put one foot before another and the years have passed, the time marked by late rent payments and the appearance of wrinkles - tiny ones, on the corners of my eyes. They are a reminder of my youth, and of the hourglass that we all live in, grains of sand slipping through the gap of time, each granule adding another wrinkle, another pocket of fat, another sag that I will fight to overcome, another grey hair to pluck or dye. — Alessandra Torre

God will forgive you if you ask him to. Though your sins be numerous as the grains of sand on the shore, God's merciful forgiveness is far greater than your sins. Do not be afraid. Trust in his love. Repent of your sins without delay and return to the house of the Father. He is waiting for you. — Patrick Madrid

Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth. — Carl Sagan

Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains, and atomies infinity. — Eric Knight

Does one grow wise in increments? By fractioning a life and then summing it? By stacking sand? An infant, in his first sleepiness, must let go of the world; a man must learn to die. What comes between are the grains of sand. Ambition. Loss. Envy. Desire. Hatred. Love. Tenderness. Joy. Shame. Loneliness. Ecstasy. Ache. Surrender. Live long enough and you will solve them all. — Ethan Canin

Mother is the rock, I am the ocean. I have to pout and roll my eyes for hours until she finally wears down and crumbles into a thousand grains of beach sand. It takes a lot of energy. I don't think I have it in me. — Laurie Halse Anderson

To shift a few grains of sand is no more a sign of great strength than to see the sun a sign of great sight. There is no glory in dominating the weak. — Peter V. Brett

One thought includes all thought, in the sense that a grain of sand includes the universe. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I am grains of sand in a storm made of Alec, scattering in his fierce wind and spinning back. Out to my limits and then retracted. Billow and fall. But the wind gusts into something even stronger, something more, and with one final, unstoppable spiral out, I dissolve into absolutely nothing but a leftover pulse of a girl that used to exist. And an exhausted Cheshire smile. — Riley Edgewood

Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars. — James Jeans

She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?" And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own. — David Almond

No matter what she was doing-baking cookies, walking around the lake on a beautiful day, making love to her husband-she felt rushed and jittery, as if the last few grains of sand were at that very moment sliding through the narrow waist of an hourglass. Any unforeseen occurrence-road construction, an inexperienced cashier, a missing set of keys-could plunge her into a mood of frantic despair that could poison an entire day. — Tom Perrotta

Still all "realities" and "fantasies" can take on form only by means of writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience and fantasy appear composed of the same verbal material. The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained in uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses - pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind. — Italo Calvino

People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. "Stephen," they say, accusingly, "you know a lot." This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existance we have never even guessed at, let alone visited. — Stephen Fry

God is everywhere, in the smallest grain of sand. — Caspar David Friedrich

Take three grains of sand and put them in the middle of a vast cathedral. Now the cathedral is as full with sand as the universe is with stars...Most of the universe is empty space! — Vedang Sati

Get into the arena, forget about the critics and play big with the gifts of your days. If you listen to your critics, you will never do anything great with your life. Life is short and the years will slip away very quickly, like grains of sand passing through your fingers on a hot day at the beach. You were meant to shine and let your talents see the light of day. — Robin S. Sharma

Little drops of water, little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean, and the pleasant land.
So the little minutes, humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages of eternity. — Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney

Why did you make it so hard for me? I'd rather empty the ocean with a sieve. I do it for you. Or count the grains of sand on every beach. All for you. There are so many people, so many countries. But I have time. All the time in the world. Eternity. — Grant Morrison

As you know, this little grain of sand has mass. A very small mass, but mass nonetheless."
And because this grain of sand has mass, it therefore exerts gravity. Again, too small to feel, but there."
Now," Katherine said, "if we take trilions of these sand grains and let them attract one another to form ... say, the moon, then their combined gravtiy is enough to move entire ocreans and drag the tides back and forth across our planet. — Dan Brown

The air was cool and soft. The desert looked empty from our great height, enough to believe the geographers and travel writers who tell of the terrible desert life, the stillness, harshness, and death. I lay against the cold sand, tiny grains dancing fast and furious across my skin. I saw insects and scorpions, the line of a snake. Mohammed said the dunes moved millimeters a day. They inched across the desert floor toward the ocean. I smiled. The geographers were blind. — C. Lynn Murphy

The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brecciated fragments of the Hellas impact itself. She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The profoundly 'atomic' character of the universe is visible in everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts of the living, and the multitude of stars; even in the ashes of the dead. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

It has been a week since Ami died and this morning I woke suddenly hours before dawn, indeed the same hour as when my mother died. It was not a dream that woke me, but a thought. And with that thought I could swear I heard Ami's voice.
But I am not frightened. I am joyous. Joyous with realization. For I cannot help but think what a lucky person I am. Imagine that in all the eons of time, in all the possible universes of which Dara speaks, of all the stars in the heavens, Ami and I came together for one brief and shining sliver of time.
I stop. I think.
Supposing in the grand infinity of this universe two particles of life, Ami and me, swirl endlessly like grains of sand in the oceans of the world
how much of a chance is there for these two particles, these two grains of sand, to collide, to rest briefly together ... at the same moment in time?
That is what happened with Ami and me ... this miracle of chance. — Kathryn Lasky

Sometimes it's the case that when you hear the thing you have most wanted to hear, you cannot take it in. Hope is everyone's mirage and everyone who comes upon that green and grassy spot, the swaying date palms and the bubbling blue pool, is temporarily taken in, even people who have been there before and even when, upon closer inspection, the oasis is nothing but a reef of sand; even with grains of sand blowing lightly across our faces, we find ourselves standing on soft grass of a tenacious, unreasonable green. — Amy Bloom