I Sense Quotes & Sayings

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage. — Anna Quindlen

I'm more than a songwriter. I'm a creative person. Some people you just always see. I won't allow you to see me unless it makes sense. There's a reason to see me. — Ester Dean

My one challenge with the support group that I'd become involved with on campus is that the people seem to spend as much time talking about their ill-begotten pasts as their promising futures. It's as if people are drawn to looking back. They can't move on until it all makes sense. Humbly submitted: It never does. — Carol Plum-Ucci

The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

I'm a great believer in the hereafter, in karma, in reincarnation. It does make sense. I believe that God is not just a law-giver, but a creative artist. The greatest of all. And what characterises artists is that they want to redo their work. Maybe it didn't come off perfectly, so they want to see it done again, and improved. Reincarnation is a way for God to improve his earlier works. — Norman Mailer

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. — Audre Lorde

At the point when Jared relayed Ash's habit of hiding his cuddly toys in the freezer, Kami started to laugh in the movie theater. Ash glanced over at her. "Sorry," Kami murmured. "Just - the movie's funny." Ash looked back at the movie, in which a small blond child was dying of leukemia. "I have a very warped sense of humor," Kami whispered. — Sarah Rees Brennan

It makes me sick, the way sadness is addicting. The way I can't stop. Sadness is familiar. It's comfortable and it's easy in a sense that it comes naturally to me. But everything else about it is hard. The way my body aches with self-hatred. The way my mind spins and spins with hopeless thoughts. The way it poisons everything I do, every relationship I have. Yet it's addicting, because I know sadness, and I know it very well. And there's a sort of comfort in that, like being home after a trip or sleeping in your own bed after being away. There's just a sense that this is where I belong. This is how it's supposed to be. — Marianna Paige

At 86, I can easily look back to the last eight decades. Though memory often fails me now, so many images of the past are still clearly polished, and I can yet recall not just an abiding sense of place, but the keen smells, the sensory responses to the events of that past. — F. Sionil Jose

In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins. — Antoni Tapies

But I was always much more interested in reading fashion magazines than I was music magazines when I was a teenager. Just that sense of romanticism and escapism and the dream of it has always been quite alluring to me, as well as that sense of becoming a character through clothes. — Florence Welch

The person that always comes to mind, and it's odd now because we've become pals, is Ben Folds. I've always considered him like a musical older brother, from afar, in the sense that I always felt I had a much better understanding of what he was singing about five years after I was listening to it. — Jason Sudeikis

If there is any sense of order to the universe, acting is what I am meant to do. I'm not manufactured. I know acting isn't real, that it's temporary. If there is any theme to the roles I play, it is emotional vulnerability and availability. — DJ Qualls

From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. "Reality" history as we had known or inferred it was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea. — Robert Charles Wilson

I'm not good at having friends. I mean, I can make myself useful to people. I can fit in. I get invited to parties and I can sit at any table I want in the cafeteria.
But actually trusting someone when they have nothing to gain from me just doesn't make sense.
All friendships are negotiations of power. — Holly Black

I have always tried to maintain a sense of humanity in my work, to create something that will take on its own personality but also reflect something about our world. — Dean Mitchell

Everybody I know who is funny, it's in them. You can teach timing, or some people are able to tell a joke, though I don't like to tell jokes. But I think you have to be born with a sense of humor and a sense of timing. — Carol Burnett

I am not a Bible-believing Christian in the fullest sense simply by believing the right doctrines, but as I live in practice in this supernatural world. — Francis A. Schaeffer

When auditioning, I try to imagine that I'm the only person that they [directors] are seeing that day because it can be overwhelming, in the same sense that it could be overwhelming if you try to fulfil everyone's expectations rather than the people closest to you in the creative process, be it your director, or fellow actors and the writers. So, that's kind of it - I try to trick myself into believing that no one has ever gone there before. — Benedict Cumberbatch

My parents split up when I was young, and I was living with my mom for a little while, then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy, it was just never really a very close-knit family. So there was support in the sense that they didn't stand in my way. — Ani DiFranco

I think play and joy and feeling good deserve more of our time. I don't see why adults are supposed to grow out of those things. If I have a mission it's to make everyone who comes to my concerts leave feeling a heightened sense of freedom to play, sing, and enjoy themselves. — Bobby McFerrin

Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls - you don't find a sense of community in malls. — Bill Bryson

It doesn't sound like there was time for the word to be there. On the other hand, I didn't intentionally make an inane statement ... certainly the 'a' was intended, because that's the only way the statement makes any sense. — Neil Armstrong

I do have a strong sense of God. It's impossible to explain what I mean when I say that, of course. — Marianne Faithfull

The inner life is bruised by a running against the laws of the Kingdom. The bruises are guilt complexes, a sense of inferiority, of missing the mark, of being out of harmony with God and with oneself, a sense of wrongness. Divine forgiveness wipes out all that sense of inner hurt and condemnation. Brings a sense of at-homeness- at home with God and oneself and with life. The universe opens its arms and takes one in. You are accepted- by God, by yourself, and by life. All self-loathing, self-rejection, all inferiorities drop away. You are a child of God; born from above, you walk the earth, a conqueror, afraid of nothing. Healed at the heart, you can say to life: Come on, I'm ready for anything. — E. Stanley Jones

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. — Julian Barnes

The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to. — Lawrence Clark Powell

I take my personal upkeep real seriously; my sense of organization and attention to detail; my memory; my business - I love the business. — David Lee Roth

The first line in the first 'Gasland' is: 'I'm not a pessimist. I've always had a great deal of faith in people that we won't succumb to frenzy or rage or greed. That we'll figure out a solution without destroying the things that we love.' I have not lost that sense. — Josh Fox

I'd rather be an adviser. I don't wanna become a trainer because I think with the knowledge and the business sense that I've accomplished through my career and have credibility, why would I reduce myself down to being in a gym with a bunch of training which is not a bad thing to give advice, but I can do that with a suit and tie on and also be there when the cheques are written. I don't wanna be there when the cheques are handed down from 3 or 4 people's hands and then it hits mine as a trainer because 9/10 times, deductions have come out of that. — Bernard Hopkins

It's too soon, too fast. We don't even know each other."
"Says who?" Ethan demanded. "Who decides how long it should take? Who makes the rules?"
Erica shrugged because she really didn't know it just seemed like common sense.
He put his index finger under her chin and swept his thumb just under her lower lip. "I do know you." He whispered. "I know you love chocolate and hate roses. I know you are kind and compassionate and generous. I know you feed the homeless and the stray cat that lives behind your apartment. I know you are a hopeless romantic. You are fiercely loyal." His eyes took on a mischievous glint. "I know you are ticklish; I know what makes you moan; I know what makes you squirm." He kissed her softly. "I know when I am with you I don't want to be anywhere else." He kissed her again and this time she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. Their tongues tangled in a duel that left her breathless. — Melissa Hale

Every time I go to Europe, I remember that James Dean never saw Europe, but yet I see his face everywhere. There's James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe - windows of the Champs Elysees, discos in the south of Spain, restaurants in Sweden, t-shirts in Moscow. My life was confused and disoriented for years by his passing. My sense of destiny destroyed - the great films he would have directed, the great performances he would have given, the great humanitarian he would have become, and yet, he's the greatest actor and star I have ever known. — Dennis Hopper

When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I just try to put myself in the sense of being a character, sometimes male. I suppose I just like the idea of trying to be different people coming from all kinds of different angles. Most of it was just from my imagination. — Kate Bush

I hate the natural sound of the trumpet, but I think I'm naturally set up to be a trumpet player. I know that sounds weird. But pretty much anytime I play a note, I'm uncomfortable in a general sense. — Christian Scott

People who have fabulous childhoods have this sense that nothing is ever going to be that good again. With me, I have the sense that nothing is going to be that bad. — Nigella Lawson

Anyway ... she's asleep, turned away from me on her side. The usual stratagems and repositionings have failed to induce narcosis in me, so I decide to settle myself against the soft zigzag of her body. As I move and start to nestle my shin against a calf whose muscles are loosened by sleep, she sense what I'm doing, and without waking reaches up with her left hand and pulls the hair off her shoulders on the top of her head, leaving me her bare nape to nestle in. Each time she does this I feel a shudder of love at the exactness of this sleeping courtesy. My eyes prickle with tears, and I have to stop myself from waking her up to remind her of my love. At that moment, unconsciously, she's touched some secret fulcrum of my feelings for her. — Julian Barnes

And here it is that I miss my Watson. By cunning questions and ejaculations of wonder he could elevate my simple art, which is but systematized common sense, into a prodigy. When I tell my own story I have no such aid. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Hang onto your sense of humor. I picture my obituary : The sexiest man alive is now dead. — Mark Harmon

For agnosticism is, in a sense, what I am preaching. I do not wish to reduce the sceptical element in your minds. I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else. — C.S. Lewis

I knew what the sanctified life was not. Not a life filled with more rituals, more scrupulously observed. Not more praying. Not becoming a better person, being more charitable, more concerned with everyone else's pains. Sanctifying had something to do with a sense of constant wonder - feeling gratitude and finding significance everywhere, in every action, relationship and object. — Vanessa L Ochs

I loved Monty Python for the wordplay
this sense that you didn't have to squash your intelligence to be funny. In fact, you could walk right into your intelligence and nerdiness and self-doubt, and that could be funny. — George Saunders

As a devout Baptist, she believed it was a sin to pray for anything for yourself. You ought to pray only for strength to bear whatever the Lord saw fit to send you, she thought. I was never able to follow this advice, for although I would often feel a sense of uneasiness over the tone of my prayers, I was the kind of person who prayed frantically-Please, God, please, please, PLEASE let Ross MacVey like me better than Mavis. — Margaret Laurence

I wish to make it clear that 'history' in the sense in which most people speak of it simply does not exist; and this is at least one reason why I say that it has no meaning. — Karl R. Popper

It was always about the future of writers, and about the way writers are treated in the future, and I think that was really hurtful to a lot of people in my position who had 160 people who depended on them to get this over with. So there was a lot of pain in it, and in that sense it will never be worth it, but I do think it was important. — Edward Allen Bernero

I'm completely lacking any sense of religious belief, but I am superstitious. — Clive Sinclair

When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence. — Vladimir Nabokov

In my opinion, Jesus is God's attempt to reach man. But while I believe Jesus is the way to God, it makes no sense to hate people who disagree. — Jerry B. Jenkins

The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming. — Freeman Dyson

Unless it's out of the goodness of someone's heart, I don't like having things given to me for free. I like working hard for what I earn. It gives me a sense of gratitude, and that's the only way I can truly appreciate it. — Sasha Azevedo

I have a robust sense of humour which helps me deal with problems. — Peter Mayle

I've been a foodie most of my life. I started when I lived for a year in Germany in my early 20s, and here was this new food environment, and I decided I needed to make sense of it. And I found it was the rules of economics that do the best job. Food is a capitalist product of supply and demand. — Tyler Cowen

This is an important lesson to remember when you're having a bad day, a bad month, or a shitty year. Things will change: you won't feel this way forever. And anyway, sometimes the hardest lessons to learn are the ones your soul needs most. I believe you can't feel real joy unless you've felt heartache. You can't have a sense of victory unless you know what it means to fail. You can't know what it's like to feel holy until you know what it's like to feel really fucking evil. And you can't be birthed again until you've died. — Kelly Cutrone

I believe that to meet the challenge of our times, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. We must all learn to work not just for our own self, family, or nation but for the benefit of all humankind. Universal responsibility is the key to human survival. It is the best foundation for world peace, the equitable use of natural resources, and through concern for future generations, the proper care of the environment. — Dalai Lama

The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map. — Fern Schumer Chapman

She raised her eyebrows, looping her hands around his neck and wriggling provocatively. 'Looks like I've just been promoted to Alpha then, huh?'
Lucien made a face. 'Well the job is yours if you want it, but I should warn you that the contract is bull crap. I've received none of the perks that were promised.'
'Perks?'
'Oh, you know ... a lifetime supply of beer and foot massages, a harem of women to bathe and clothe me etcetera ... '
She snorted and pulled back from him. 'Harem of women?'
He grinned unrepentantly. 'Did I mention my sense of humour is greatly underappreciated? — Samantha Young

I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way. — John Zorn

A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past. — Kenneth Tynan

Thank God I could say that I had truly enjoyed the journey, because if I had saved all of my joy for the destination, I would have missed it. We are all so focused on getting "there," but you have to be careful. Sometimes, I sense a lot of times, "there" ends up feeling different than you expected. — Robin Roberts

I retreat into my fictional world where everything makes sense - but even there I can't even control what people do ... — John Geddes

Love you," Xavier said just before he drifted back to sleep.
"Love you more," I said playfully.
"Not a chance," Xavier said, fully awake now. "I'm bigger, I can contain more love."
"I'm smaller, therefore my love particles are more compressed, which means I can fit more in."
Xavier laughed. "That argument makes no sense. Overruled."
"I'm just basing it on how much I miss you when you're not around," I countered.
"How can you possibly know how much I miss you?" he said. "Have you got some sort of built-in miss-o-meter that can give us a reading?"
"I'm a girl; of course I have a built-in miss-o-meter. — Alexandra Adornetto

It's not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit. We wouldn't tolerate schools that don't teach, that are chronically underfunded and understaffed and underinspired, if we thought that the children in them were like our children. I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those who are struggling. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves. — Barack Obama

Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities — William T. Vollmann

The vulgar look upon a man, who is reckoned a fine speaker, as a phenomenon, a supernatural being, and endowed with some peculiargift of Heaven; they stare at him, if he walks in the park, and cry, that is he. You will, I am sure, view him in a juster light, and nulla formidine. You will consider him only as a man of good sense, who adorns common thoughts with the graces of elocution, and the elegancy of style. The miracle will then cease. — Lord Chesterfield

I like when things happen organically and make sense. — Kristen Taekman

Planned Parenthood gave me an award for the Willie Parker story that I was deeply honored by. I didn't get any negative comments. I think the Willie Parker piece had more of an impact on people in that sense because it went deeper into the clinic itself. — John H Richardson

What I look for in musicians is a sense of infinity. — Pat Metheny

But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?
To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there. — Donna Tartt

I went through a phase of eating dinner in the shower because I thought, 'Why don't we do that?' Then I realised, 'Because it doesn't make any sense.' It doesn't save any time, and you can't really get into a steak and baked potato when there's water pouring on you. — Brie Larson

When I'm actually writing by hand, I get more of a sense of the rhythm of sentences, of syntax. The switch to the computer is when I actually start thinking about lines. That's the workhorse part. At that point, I'm being more mathematical about putting the poem on the page and less intuitive about the rhythm of the syntax. — Natasha Trethewey

So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary - how am I to resolve them? — Richard Flanagan

Now I know I'll never be numb again. A mother is condemned to feel everything forever. And I'm finally afraid, condemned to fear everything forever. But that makes sense: feel someone else's pain, feel someone else's everything.
And he's my baby, so everything's okay. — Kristin Hersh

I worked with John, but I had enough sense to walk just a little ways behind him. I could have made more records, but I wanted to have a marriage. — June Carter Cash

I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library. — Alberto Manguel

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination. — Richard Russo

I would say that when I came into this chapter of my filmmaking career, starting with 'The Fighter,' there was this sense that you have to go from your instincts and you have to go from your gut, and you have to not hesitate and you have to not hedge. — David O. Russell

Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger - I've got a sixth sense for it now. We're homesick for it, some of us; it's called the 'Afghan syndrome'. — Svetlana Alexievich

J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and class, journeying to war and returning home. I've heard it said that he was trying to create some kind of original British mythology using the structure of other cultures' myths, and maybe that was true. I don't know. What I see, when I read his work, is a man trying desperately to dream.
Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don't have enough myths of our own, we'll latch onto those of others - even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it's human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight. — N.K. Jemisin

Death does determine life. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason. For me death is the maximum of epicness and death. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

By reshaping or decorating our outer selves, we express our inner sense of self: 'I like that' becomes 'I'm like that.' — Virginia Postrel

I have a dark sense of humor,' Fanny explained.
'What's that supposed to mean?' asked Honor.
'It means I'm funny once you get to know me,' Fanny said. — Allegra Goodman

And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it because I'm pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humour, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can't do? Has she fallen in love with me?
As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that she has. — Mohsin Hamid

I will not allow people to impose rules on me that don't make sense to me. And I live and work very much outside the literary world and the literary system. What they think and what they believe and what their rules are mean nothing to me. — James Frey

I have a very genuine care for individuals; I have a very genuine sense of the power of individuals to make a difference, a very genuine belief that people matter, a very genuine belief of wanting the very best for individuals. — Gail Kelly

She had this uncanny sense of seeing things the way they were instead of the way you'd want them to be, of knowing me better than I knew myself. She could sniff out the truth even if it hurt. — Mike Gayle

I am a very honest person, and I can only say there are moments in my life where I really did think I was being me in the sense of my morals and beliefs and the way I acted. But when I look back at certain things that I wore and my hair and make-up, I was like, 'Whoa! That wasn't me!' But I didn't know it back then. — Jessie J.

I do not believe that any form of lasting community can exist where people do not share the same sense of what is just and what is not just. — J.M. Coetzee

In my heart I like to remain an amateur, in the sense of being in love with what I'm doing, forever astonished again at the endless possibilities of seeing and using the camera as a recording tool. — Inge Morath

The question from agnosticism is, 'who turned on the lights?' The question from faith is 'whatever for?' Thoreau climbed Mount Katahdin and gives vent to an almost outraged sense of the reality of the things of this world: "I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries- think of our life in nature-daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,- rocks, trees, wind! — Annie Dillard

There's no sense drawing attention to yourself, Li." "Hellooooo. I'm aHorseman of the Apocalypse, and I'm betrothed to the most infamous, most powerful demon in existence. I couldn't draw more attention to myself i I wore Lady Gaga's meat dress to a PETA convention. — Larissa Ione

I had a sense of being dropped straight into the middle of a book without having read the early chapters. — Emma Scott

Something that is appealing is wars are terrible and ugly and hard and each conflict is different, but of every conflict I've ever gone to, I've also seen people being extraordinary in a good sense. It's not just a black and white extreme situation that pushes people to extremes and they do crazy bad stuff. You also see crazy brave stuff. You see humanity in a different light. — Shaul Schwarz

Reading was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I'd keep the book hidden so I could read during class. Before long I bought a small stereo and spent all my time in my room, listening to jazz records. But I had almost no desire to talk to anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. In that sense I could be called a stack-up loner. — Haruki Murakami

There is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It's true for everyone. But maybe that isn't wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there's no reason to complain. And besides who would be complaint to anyway? (A Walk To Kobe, Granta 124: Travel) — Haruki Murakami

To restore a sense of reality, I think Walt Disney should have a Hardluckland. — Jack Paar

I am mad again, he thought. Tears brimmed. He swallowed in a tightened throat. I don't want to be. I'm tired, I'm tired and horny, I'm so tired I can't make sense out of any of it and my mind won't work right half the time I try. I'm thirsty. My head's all filled with kapok coffee wouldn't clear. Still, I wish I had some. Where am I going, what am I doing, stumbling in this smoking graveyard? It's not the pain; only that the pain keeps going on. He tried to let all his muscles go and stepped aimlessly from sidewalk to gutter, his mouth dryer and dryer and dryer. Well, he thought, if it hurts, it hurts. It's only pain. — Samuel R. Delany

They said that love was terrifying and tender, wild and sweet, and none of it made any sense.
But now I knew that every mad word was true. — Rosamund Hodge

I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine! — Helen Keller

I was blessed in the sense that I got handed so much early on in life. I got a lot of the things people go through their 20s and 30s craving. — Sheena Easton

... I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn't seem to suffice, not really - rather's it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting's will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it's brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world. — Mark Doty