Insubstantial Quotes & Sayings

The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. That which is not known of does not trouble us, while an imagined but insubstantial peril does not harm us. To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden. — H.P. Lovecraft

Before his dreams had been fragile, insubstantial things, like strands of gossamer and they would fall apart and fade as soon as his eyes opened to the light of a new morning. — John Carter

Try as i do, i can't recall her surname. Indeed, her very abstractedness and insubstantial personality seemed to say 'forget me'; she seemed to live in parenthesis; ... — Muriel Spark

The present was always paramount, in a way that thrust you forward: empty, but also free. Whatever stories you told over to yourself and others, you were in truth exposed and naked in the present, a prow cleaving new waters; your past was insubstantial behind, it fell away, it grew into desuetude, its forms grew obsolete. The problem was, you were always still alive, until the end. You had to do something. — Tessa Hadley

Before I loved Maara, life seemed filled with endless possibility, yet I knew even then what I was waiting for. Love was only an idea to me then, something to hope for, a promise of happiness, insubstantial and immortal, until it found the one to settle on. Now love and Maara were one and the same, and love had become as mortal as she was. — Catherine M. Wilson

When we begin from a place of belief, no matter how small or insubstantial, we can see what was always there, hidden in plain sight. — Christie Purifoy

The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead, that, becoming once more a still, plane surface after having engulfed a person, a reality extends, without even a ripple at the point of disappearance from which that person is excluded, in which there no longer exists any will, any knowledge, and from which it is as difficult to reascend to the idea that that person has lived as, from the still recent memory of his life, it is to think that he is comparable with the insubstantial images, the memories, left us by the characters in a novel we have been reading. — Marcel Proust

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful. — Samuel R. Delany

At the end only two things really matter to a man, regardless of who he is; and they are the affection and understanding of his family. Anything and everything else he creates are insubstantial; they are ships given over to the mercy of the winds and tides of prejudice. but the family is an everlasting anchorage, a quiet harbor where a man's ships can be left to swing to the moorings of pride and loyalty. — Richard E. Byrd

There is a wicked and pervading arrogance loose on the earth, like a rabid beast, an overdog. Does it run, does it slouch, does its name have a number? The beast preaches contempt, for that's what arrogance says: that nothing is real but itself, and the bone and blood of another's being are insubstantial as breath. — Kelly Cherry

The days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality. — Penelope Lively

Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction. — Walter Moers

Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence. — Olaf Stapledon

The ancient intuition that all matter, all "reality," is energy, that all phenomena, including time and space, are mere crystallizations of mind, is an idea with which few physicists have quarreled since the theory of relativity first called into question the separate identities of energy and matter. Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form; that matter is insubstantial in origin, a temporary aggregate of he pervasive energy that animates the electron. — Peter Matthiessen

No dish changes quite so much from season to season as soup. Summer's soups come chilled, in pastel colors strewn with herbs. If hot they are sheer insubstantial broths afloat with seafood. In winter they turn steaming and thick to serve with slabs of rustic, crusty bread. — Florence Fabricant

I was hoping Betsy Nash would disappear. Literally. She was so insubstantial, I could imagine her slowly evaporating, leaving only a sticky spot on the edge of the sofa. But she lingered, eyes darting between me and her husband before we even began speaking. Like she was winding up for the conversation. The children, too, hovered about, little blonde ghosts trapped in a limbo between indolence and stupidity. The pretty girl might do all right. But the piggy middle child, who now waddled dazedly into the room, was destined for needy sex and snack-cake bingeing. The boy was the type who'd end up drinking in gas-station parking lots. The kind of angry, bored kid I saw on my way into town. — Gillian Flynn

Shadows are where magic comes from. Your dark and dancing self, slipping behind and ahead and around, never quite looking at the sun. Fairyland-Below is the shadow of Fairyland, and this is where magic gets born and grows up and sows its oats before coming out into the world. The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming. Before Halloween, we lived in the upper world, where the light makes us insubstantial, thin, scraps of thought and shade. We weren't unhappy - we made good magic for the world, sportsmanlike stuff. We reflected our bodies' deeds, and when our brothers and sisters went to sleep, we had our own pretty lives, our shadow loves, our shadow markets, our shadow races. But we had no idea, no idea how it could be under the world with our Hollow Queen. And now we shall never go back. — Catherynne M Valente

A goal that is not in writing is like cigarette smoke: It drifts away and disappears. It is vague and insubstantial. It has no force, effect, or power. But a written goal becomes something that you can see, touch, read, and modify if necessary. — Brian Tracy

There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I have a real aversion to machines. I write with a pen. Then I read it to someone who writes it onto the computer. What are those computer letters made of anyway? Light? Too insubstantial. Paper, you can feel it. A pen. There's a connection. A pen goes exactly at your speed, whereas that machine jumps. And then, that machine is waiting for you, just humming uh-huh, yes? — Fran Lebowitz

He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward into stability and then retreated into insubstantial uncertainty. An oscillation, each phase lasting a few seconds and then blurring off into its opposite, a fairly regular variability as if an organic pulsation underlay the structure. As if, he thought, it's alive. — Philip K. Dick

The blue smoke rose into the blue air, solemn, beautiful as all that day. I stood there long after everyone else was gone, and my life seemed to me to have as much meaning as that wavering and insubstantial column, or as the dead grass that fed it. — Howard Spring

Now I can do the bolts," she slurred. "I've been trying to focus enough magic all week."
The magic shifted and swirled, finally etching a picture in the air. It was a rough picture of Foaly, and he was laughing.
I hate you, centaur!" screamed Opal, lunging toward, and then through, the insubstantial image. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and then she collapsed, snoring, on the floor.
Artemis straightened his tie.
Freud, he was certain, would have a field day with that. — Eoin Colfer

Since the fanciful vision of the future that had flitted through her imagination at their first meeting she had hardly ever thought of his marrying her. She had not had to put the thought from her mind; it had not been there. If ever she looked ahead she felt instinctively that the gulf between them was too deep, and that the bridge their passion had flung across it was as insubstantial as a rainbow. But she seldom looked ahead; each day was so rich that it absorbed her.... — Edith Wharton

What appears to be definite and precise does not belong to any acceptable reality. It is only the experiences, the queer previsions, the fleeting premonitions, that are real. Vague and insubstantial though they may appear to be, compared with anything else in the mists and shifting lights of Time theory, they loom up like mountains of iron ore. — J.B. Priestley

He entered the room, noticing three things at once. There was a fire beginning to build in the small brick fireplace on the wall to his left, the room smelt like its owner, clean and delicate and flowery, and Lauren lay stretched on the bed. Naked.
His heart slammed harder against his chest and his c#ck twitched again. At this rate, it wouldn't take long at all before he would be sliding into her. Jesus, just looking at her turned him on. Turned him on and left him at her mercy. No, that wasn't right. Left him ... absolute. Without her in his life, he'd been insubstantial. — Lexxie Couper

The softest of stuff in the world, penetrates quickly the hardest, insubstantial, it enters where there is no room ... — Laozi

She was plagued again by the feeling that the room in which she stood, the earth on which it was built, and the universe in which it turned were as insubstantial as smoke, subject to sudden change. (pg. 249) — Dean Koontz

There are those who will seek to block you. There are also non-physical forces. To win in the world of enlightenment, it is necessary to be able to will away these forces, to see they're insubstantial. — Frederick Lenz

He reached for a tabletop and ran his hands over it, clutching the edge until his knuckles turned white.
He wanted to know that it was solid. Eddis knew that all the world would seem to him insubstantial, as if it might tear away and reveal something else infinitely larger and more terrifying. — Megan Whalen Turner

Here in this world, justice loses, and beauty is weak, and truth is shouted down, and everything goes wrong. But we know, in our souls if not in our hearts, that we deserve better. We deserve and yearn for a world where justice triumphs, and beauty is all powerful and truth cannot be quenched by lies any more than insubstantial shadows can fly from earth to the center of the solar system and strangle the sun. So, to remind ourselves of what we have forgotten, we talk about times in real life when justice triumphed, or the beauty was not marred, or truth could not be hidden. — John C. Wright

To exist without awareness, that was what you aimed at. Memories worn to irrelevance, the future equally insubstantial. — Daniel Polansky

Within the human consciousness is the unique ability to perceive the transparency between absolute, permanent relationships, contained in the insubstantial forms of a geometric order, and the transitory, changing forms of our actual world. The content of our experience results from an immaterial, abstract, geometric architecture which is composed of harmonic waves of energy, nodes of relationality, melodic forms springing forth from the eternal realm of geometric proportion. — Robert Lawlor

Several times in my life I've gone through long periods without sex or any other kind of physical contact. The hunger it produces is deep and low; it's possible to lose track of it, to forget or fail to perceive how it's emptied everything out of you and made the world papery and thin. Touch starved, you brush against existence like a stick against dry leaves. You become insubstantial yourself, a hungry ghost. — Hari Kunzru

The memory seems both real and unreal, reliable and tenuous, solid and insubstantial. — Rabih Alameddine

The trebling of the population in this small and impoverished country, flowing with milk and honey but not with sufficient water, rich in rocks and sand dunes but poor in natural resources and vital raw materials, has been no easy task: Indeed, practical men, with their eyes fixed upon things as they are, regarded it as an empty and insubstantial utopian dream. — David Ben-Gurion

There's something almost weightless about our world, I think, something fleeting and insubstantial that's ill at ease with any pretence of certainty. — Deirdre Madden

[That wall] might be breached sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken.
The most terrible thing, though, was the fear that the wall could never be breached, that in his heart Alai was glad of the separation, and was ready to be Ender's enemy. For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other. — Orson Scott Card

Fear comes at me like a massive bull with lowered horns ready to gore. But I have learned of the insubstantial nature of fear: if I stand my ground, it will pass right through me. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Built on the insubstantial foundation of our feelings, the life we had created together seemed a figment of our imaginations that dissolved into fairy dust in the face of something real, and deadly, like cancer. — Kim Van Alkemade

In Europe there's been a kind of social contract. It's now declining, but it has been largely imposed by the strength of the unions, the organised work force and the relative weakness of the business community (which, for historical reasons, isn't as dominant in Europe as it has been here). European governments do see primarily to the needs of private wealth, but they also have created a not insubstantial safety net for the rest of the population. They have general health care, reasonable services, etc. We haven't had that, in part because we don't have the same organised work force, and we have a much more class-conscious and dominant business community. — Noam Chomsky

He stood up. In his own mind, he stepped sideways. Shifting his
thoughts. His fears were his own, weren't they? He'd spun them out
from himself. He'd forged them from every hurt and fury. Fear was a
reminder that even the insubstantial could kill. But insubstantial meant it had no shape. It couldn't be conquered or tamed or avoided. Only moved through, with force and will. Vikram crouched, his fingers splayed on the ground, his breath forming icicles in the air.
His fears bore down. Sharp. Hungry. He grinned.
I made you.
I own you.
He repeated the words like a mantra, until he found the strength to
stand . . .
And run. — Roshani Chokshi

A man may be accused of cowardice for fleeing away from all manner of physical dangers but when things supernatural, insubstantial and inexplicable threaten not only his safety and well-being but his sanity, his innermost soul, then retreat is not a sign of weakness but the most prudent course. — Susan Hill

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow. — Sophocles

There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics. — Gregory Benford

I'd found heaven and grabbed it as tightly as I could, but it was unraveling, an insubstantial thread sliding between my fingers, too fine to hold. — Maggie Stiefvater

I take pop culture really seriously, I think it's really important, and the stuff that I make ... I don't want it to be insubstantial, even if it's about something wacky, like sharpening pencils. I feel like I owe it to myself and I owe it to people who are really interested in pencils and I owe it to anybody to do my due diligence and give them something real. — David Rees

O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why? — Julian Jaynes

Science Fiction had made itself a part of the general debate of our times. It has added to the literature of the world ; through its madness and freewheeling ingenuity , it has helped form the new pop music, through its raising of semi religious questions, it has become part of the underworld where drugs, mysticism, God-kicks, and sometimes even murder meet ; and lastly , it has become one of the most popular entertainment in its own rights, a wacky sort of fiction that grabs and engulfs anything new or old for its subject matter, turning it into a shining and often insubstantial wonder. — Brian W. Aldiss

The outer world in all its variety and our inner world of thoughts and emotions are not as they seem. All phenomena appear to exist objectively, but their true mode of existence is like a dream: apparent yet insubstantial. — Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact. This is obvious in our understanding of time, which, being thingless and insubstantial, appears to us as if it had no reality.2 Indeed, we know what to do with space but do not know what to do about time, except to make it subservient to space. Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face.3 Time to us is sarcasm, a slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives. Shrinking, therefore, from facing time, we escape for shelter to things of space. The intentions we are unable to carry out we deposit in space; possessions become the symbols of our repressions, jubilees of frustrations. But things of space are not fireproof; they only add fuel to the flames. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

All I was aware of was this hole, this gaping hole where my heart should have been. I read somewhere once that your heart is supposed to be the same size as your clenched fist, but this hole felt far bigger. It seemed to expand over my whole upper body and it felt cold, vacant - the cooling wind seemed to cut right through it. I felt frail and insubstantial, as if the wind could have blown me away. — Maggie O'Farrell

There was something ghost-like and insubstantial about gases to these early chemists. They called liquids that turned into gases easily, "spirits." Methyl alcohol, they called "wood spirit"; ethyl alcohol, "wine spirit." Even today, alcoholic beverages are frequently referred to as "spirits." (Modern Arabs, from whose language the word "alcohol" was taken, call ethyl alcohol "spirit" from the English. This is a queer exchange.) — Isaac Asimov

Subtle and insubstantial, the expert leaves no trace; divinely mysterious, he is inaudible. Thus he is master of his enemy's fate. — Sun Tzu

And then I saw him and nothing was ever the same again.
The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same. Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch. — Stephen Fry

Grimacing, I plunged a hand into the fouled water to clear the clog, morbid curiosity drawing my youthful eyes to the gray globs of gore floating upon the surface. It was not horror that seized my imagination so much as wonder: sixty years of dreams and desires, hunger and hope, love and longing, blasted away in a single explosive instant, mind and brain. The mind of Erasmus Gray was gone; the remnants of its vessel floated, as light and insubstantial as popcorn, in the water. Which fluffy bit held your ambition, Erasmus Gray? Which speck your pride? Ah, how absurd the primping and preening of our race! Is it not the ultimate arrogance to believe we are more than is contained in our biology? What counterarguments may be put forth, what valid objections raised, to the claim of Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity"? — Rick Yancey

I fear books; for I have heard it said, and I think it true, that a man who
spends long enough in their company grows at last unmindful of the world outside their covers, and lives finally in a twilight world of fantastic things and places as insubstantial as dreams. — Chris Naylor

We declare that only man exists. This is not to say that material, inorganic nature and nonhuman beings-animals and plants-are in any sense unreal, insubstantial, or illusory because they do not so exist. We merely state that the reality of these nonhuman realms differs from that of human existence, whose primary characteristic is Da-sein (literally being-the-there) ... Man as man is present ... in a manner wholly different from ... inanimate things. — Medard Boss

Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world? — Euripides

The stories in books hate the stories in newspapers, David's mother would say. Newspaper stories were like newly caught fish, worthy of attention only for as long as they remained fresh, which was not very long at all. They were like the street urchins hawking the evening editions, all shouty and insistent, while stories- real stories, proper made-up stories-were like stern but helpful librarians in a well-stocked library. Newspaper stories were as insubstantial as smoke, as long-lived as mayflies. They did not take root but were instead like weeds that crawled along the ground, stealing the sunlight from more deserving tales. — John Connolly

[P]eople are insubstantial. They never last. All this fuss, it's all fuss about nothing. We're here for a while and then we're gone. People are insubstantial. They never last at all. — J.G. Farrell

The ifs and buts of history ... form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet. — Vikram Seth

Perhaps Eurydice wants to remain marginal, a shade insubstantial ... the mute waste in a limbo without light and without depth are a style of anima fascinations in which the absence of significance is the significance. — James Hillman

Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of "God" to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers of God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is not nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines. — Sigmund Freud

She smiled and sipped from her glass. There was altogether too much of her sitting there, the broad expanse of thigh cradled in the insubstantial stocking and the garters with the pale flesh pursed and her full breasts and the sootblack piping of her eyelids, a gaudish rake of metaldust in prussian blue where cerulean moths fluttered her awake from some outlandish dream. Suttree gradually going awash in the sheer outrageous sentience of her. Their glasses clicked on the tabletop. Her hot spiced tongue fat in his mouth and her hands all over him like the very witch of fuck. — Cormac McCarthy

I sometimes think people can see that I'm defective, that there's nothing there. Behind the job and clothes and makeup there's nothing to know. I sometimes think I'm this shell and I can't work out why people like me. And when I'm with strangers it reminds me of that. That I'm insubstantial. — Dorothy Koomson

And so we find Fussell living alone in a flat unfurnished except for an exercise machine and 'A cardboard cut-out of Arnold with loin cloth and sword as Conan the Barbarian'. Thus the heterosexual bodybuilder's relationship to homosexuality is revealed as a sad kind of insubstantial shadow of it, a kind of mourning, a ghostly kind of love. — Mark Simpson

Granny turned slowly in her seat to look at the audience. They were staring at the performance, their faces rapt. The words washed over them in the breathless air. This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.
Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past. — Terry Pratchett

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music. — Jan Morris

I only used a cell phone for the first time after I was released. I had difficulty coping with it because it seemed so small and insubstantial. — Aung San Suu Kyi

She spoke slowly and breathlessly but she was smiling a happy smile. We stepped up and hugged her. She felt cold and frail and insubstantial. She felt like she weighed less than her aluminum walker. — Lee Child

The sneaky heftiness of the book being the aggregate cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of individually insubstantial little markings, letters and numbers, commas and periods and colons and dashes, each symbol pressed upon the page by the printing machine with a slightly greater-than-expected force and darkness and permanence. — Charles Yu

Her absence is a presence, ghostly and haunting, touching all who knew her. It is impossible that she disappeared, inconceivable that she will never return. She is at once nowhere and everywhere, a constant shadow, elusory and insubstantial, her life an unkept promise, a half-remembered dream. — Christina Baker Kline

Attraction and aversion create a sense of self. There is no self. They are just thoughts. They are insubstantial. When you die, all the ideas of self will go away. — Frederick Lenz

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in. — Maggie O'Farrell

If we constantly apply ourselves to meditation practice during the course of our lives, we may be able, though with some difficulty, to strip away all the supports that maintain the illusion of the ego-self. However, the material fabric of the ego's support-bot the world and the physical body-is destroyed by death and all contact with its "friends" is severed. Now the mind is truly left to its own devices and its experience of reality is much more direct and immediate. The worldly concerns which formerly served as the support of the ego have all been stripped away and the insubstantial nature of its condition has been exposed in all its falsity. It was never really real at all, and the awesome power of this truth may strike the consciousness like a bombshell! — Stephen Hodge

Crushed sandstone sifted through Caleb's fingers, insubstantial as dust. A breeze caught the debris mid-fall and spirited it away before it could join the ashes blanketing the ground.

He stopped in the middle of what had once been a street, his arms pulled in at his sides, his fists balled in barely restrained fury. — G.S. Jennsen

Critics are the products of their own times and biases and what they have to say about works of art is as transient and insubstantial as fashion. — Robert Genn

She hit the button again, holding her breath this time until she heard it.
Soft, sibilant, as insubstantial as the breaths that came before: Shannon. The voice whispered Shannon.
The blood rushed out of her head. Her heart knocked hard in her chest. Her knees buckled and she grabbed the counter to keep from falling. She was starting to hyperventilate, had to calm it down before she was taken by a full-blown panic attack.
Paper bag. Think. Think! Drawer below the silverware, next to the sink. Over the nose and mouth. Breathe slowly, slowly.
Holding the bag against her face, Shane slid to the floor with her back against the cabinets, legs splayed, lungs heaving.
It couldn't be him. It couldn't be Jordan. Jordan was dead. — Jane Taylor Starwood

I want to lie down and sleep, exhausted by all these puzzling, insubstantial, ridiculous, fleeting thoughts. Yes, when I feel afraid I want to go to sleep - the soul's refuge from panic. — Nina George

There was something in her black eyes that was as insubstantial as light but at the same time slower and darker than water, slower than anything I had ever seen. It reminded me of one of those moments of sadness that sometimes come when you're waiting for an inconsequential thing, like an elevator or a stop on the subway, and feel a pause that is so still that it seals itself up around you, lifts away from the stream of time, and hangs suspended there. I felt drawn toward her, the way molecules in motion are drawn toward empty spaces. — Kirsten Bakis

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in. — E.L. Doctorow

Throughout my life, until this very moment, whatever virtue I have accomplished, including any benefit that may come from this book, I dedicate to the welfare of all beings.
May the roots of suffering diminish. May warfare, violence, neglect, indifference, and addiction also decrease.
May the wisdom and compassion of all beings increase, now and in the future.
May we clearly see all the barriers we erect between ourselves and others to be as insubstantial as our dreams.
May we appreciate the great perfection of all phenomena.
May we continue to open our hearts and minds, in order to work ceaselessly for the benefit of all beings.
May we go to the places that scare us.
May we lead the life of a warrior. — Pema Chodron

Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under. — Walter Lippmann

If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us - mounts and riders, both - could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars thumble out. — Angela Carter

I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us. — Sebastian Barry

Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand. — Donna Tartt

I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains. — Carlo Rovelli

These people, they were different to anyone I'd met. They'd offered their friendship, their trust, without a second thought. I'd always been wary about new people in my life. That same old barrier I put up to protect myself. I didn't let anyone close enough to be able to hurt me. My father had left, as though I was as insubstantial as air. As a child, I'd struggled to come to terms with it. He'd been there every single day, and then he wasn't. So what were we to him? A stopgap until something he determined as better came along? With the Aunt Margot feud, and subsequent alienation of the family, it felt as though people abandoned us like we were yesterday's newspaper. Could I fall into friendships with these girls, and then leave? Maybe it was time for me to stop worrying about anything other than living in the moment. I was missing out on so much, standing on the edge of life, waiting for something that might never happen. — Rebecca Raisin

Sometimes, after they'd done the shopping, they would stop, each with his or her cart, in front of a bookstore that carried the paperback edition of his book. His wife would point to it and say: you're still there. Invariably, he would nod and then they would continue browsing the mall stores. Did he know her or didn't he? He knew her, of course he did, it was just that sometimes reality, the same little reality that served to anchor reality, seemed to fade around the edges, as if the passage of time had a porous effect on things, and blurred and made more insubstantial what was itself already, by its very nature, insubstantial and satisfactory and real. — Roberto Bolano

And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. — Thomas Mann

The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question ... He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body. — R.D. Laing

According to quantum field theory, fields alone are real. They are the substance of the universe and not 'matter'. Matter is simply the momentary manifestation of interacting fields which, intangible and insubstantial as they are, are the only real things in the universe. — Gary Zukav

Dreams are real. This is unreal. This world is unreal. Everybody has it backwards. This is the dream. This is an insubstantial pageant. Nothing here lasts - that is how you know it's the dream. — Frederick Lenz

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. — William Shakespeare

I came to feel very, very sentimental about those sets, which is ludicrous, because they represent everything which is transitory and insubstantial. It's absurd that one should feel sentimental about timber and canvas. — Patrick Stewart

Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice. — Joyce Carol Oates

In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities. There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home. — Barbara Hurd

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself
Yea, all which it inherit - shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.
Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled.
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose. A turn or two I'll walk
To still my beating mind. — William Shakespeare

My past identity separates from me and remains in the past; he becomes someone else. Is memory really as insubstantial as the fragments of information that we store in our heads? — Hideo Kojima