It S A Small World After All Quotes & Sayings

It's a small world after all — Walt Disney Company

The American army between world wars after World War I had virtually disintegrated. It was a very small force, given largely to practicing cavalry charges on western outposts. — Rick Atkinson

Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy's blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn't possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them at a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley. She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as coolly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer's small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like the nomads.
Kizzy wanted. — Laini Taylor

Nowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can have his next three years taken care of by a Guggenheim fellowship, a Kenyon Review fellowship, and the Prix de Rome, it is hard to remember what chances the poet took in that small-town world, how precariously hand-to-mouth his existence was. And yet in one way the old days were better; [Vachel] Lindsay after a while, by luck and skill, got far more readers than any poet could get today. — Randall Jarrell

Grief and anger shrink my world, and I resent this. They seem to paralyze my memory of happier times, of friends, places, things; options. Squeezed by the grip of intense, unsettling emotion, I grow smaller in my single-mindedness. I suppose it is partly because I have discarded a range of choices, impairing in some measure my freedom of will. I don't like this, but after a point I have small control over it. It makes me feel that I have surrendered to a kind of determinism, which irritates me even more. Then, vicious cycle, this feeds back into the emotion that drives me and intensifies it. The simple way of ending this situation is the headlong rush to remove its object. The difficult way is more philosophical, a drawing back, the reestablishment of control. As usual, the difficult way is preferable. A headlong rush may also result in a broken neck. — Roger Zelazny

As if Japan weren't small enough to begin with, I fail to understand why it is necessary to think of it in even smaller units. No matter where I go in the world, although I can't speak any foreign language, I don't feel out of place. I think of the earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is, and they would put an end to it. We are, after all, at a point where it is almost narrow-minded to think merely in geocentric terms. Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet? — Akira Kurosawa

The American Senate remained focused on domestic priorities and thwarted all expansionist projects. It kept the army small (25,000 men) and the navy weak. Until 1890, the American army ranked fourteenth in the world, after Bulgaria's, and the American navy was smaller than Italy's even though America's industrial strength was thirteen times that of Italy. America did not participate in international conferences and was treated as a second-rank power. In 1880, when Turkey reduced its diplomatic establishment, it eliminated its embassies in Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States. At the same time, a German diplomat in Madrid offered to take a cut in salary rather than be posted to Washington.18 — Henry Kissinger

Every human alive today came from a single mother in Africa, who lived about two hundred thousand years ago. Later, when the sea levels receded about ninety thousand years ago, a small tribe of a few hundred traveled out of the plains of Africa. After crossing the Red Sea through the Gate of Grief passageway, they fanned out and populated the entire world. How can there be any strangers among us when we all share a single common ancestor? — Nina Wirk

You get to thinking of the Earth as an organism, a living thing. You get to worry about it, care for it, wish it well. National boundaries are as invisible as meridians of longitude, or the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The boundaries are arbitrary. The planet is real. Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in Earth orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world. It — Carl Sagan

One winter evening an old knight in rusted chain-armour rode slowly along the woody southern slope of Ben Bulben, watching the sun go down in crimson clouds over the sea. His horse was tired, as after a long journey, and he had upon his helmet the crest of no neighbouring lord or king, but a small rose made of rubies that glimmered every moment to a deeper crimson. His white hair fell in thin curls upon his shoulders, and its disorder added to the melancholy of his face, which was the face of one of those who have come but seldom into the world, and always for its trouble, the dreamers who must do what they dream, the doers who must dream what they do — W.B.Yeats

But as I stood watching her, I realized how truly hard it was,really, to see someone you love change right before your eyes. Not only is it scary, it throws your balance off as well. This was how my mother felt, I realized, over the weeks I worked at Wish, as she began to not recognize me in small ways, day after day. It was no wonder she'd reacted by pulling me closer, frcibly narrowing my world back to fit insider her own. Even now, as I finally saw this as the truth it was, a part of me wishing my mother would stand up straight, take command, be back in control. But all I'd wanted when she was tugging me closer was to be able to prove to her that the changes in me were good ones, ones she'd understand if she only gave them a chance. I had that chance now. While it was scary, I was gong to take it.
~Macy, pgs 351 and 352 — Sarah Dessen

The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn't have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out 'It's a Small World After All,' flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren — Sarah Vowell

Putting my hand in someone else's has always been my definition of happiness. Before I fall asleep, often - in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and go into the greater world - often, before I get up the courage to go into the vastness of sleep, I pretend that someone has my hand in theirs, and then I go, go to that enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even after that I don't have courage, I dream. — Clarice Lispector

It was important to look confident, he realized that very early on. After all, there was a terrible tendency among adults to look at children travelling alone as if they were planning a crime of some sort. None of them ever thought that it might just be a young chap on his way to see the world and have a great adventure. They were so small minded, grown-ups. That was one of their many problems. — John Boyne

The miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes. — Wendell Berry

The words beat through me like a cosmic string that threatened to dissolve my molecular bonds. The wave fed upon itself until the tsunami it created swept me out of my life and into a world of confinement that broached vastness. That, after all, was the process of space travel. The small spaces, the great speed, the reach beyond knowable. — William David Hannah

The unicorns were the most recognizable magic the fairies possessed, and they sent them to those worlds where belief in the magic was in danger of falling altogether. After all there has to be some belief in magic- however small- for any world to survive. — Terry Brooks

Melanie cried, but only a little bit. She had gained quite a bit of experience with crying over the past few years. She could at least console herself that she never cried at trivial things; no book had ever brought her to tears. Instead, it was deaths, debts, and abandonment that moved her to tears. The world had simply decided that it didn't particularly like Melanie Masters, and that was an appropriate thing to cry about.

In the end, Melanie did what she always did after crying. She got to her feet, said a silent curse, and went back to work. The world didn't like her, but she didn't like the world either. It would be impossible to burn the whole world down, so the only other option was to carry on as though she weren't losing a small piece of her soul with every attack the world made against her. — Alexander Wales

After a short period spent in Brussels as a guest of a neurological institute, I returned to Turin on the verge of the invasion of Belgium by the German army, Spring 1940, to join my family. The two alternatives left then to us were either to emigrate to the United States, or to pursue some activity that needed neither support nor connection with the outside Aryan world where we lived. My family chose this second alternative. I then decided to build a small research unit at home and installed it in my bedroom. — Rita Levi-Montalcini

I have never yet gotten entirely over the feeling that a Yankee, on account of his peculiar teachings and bringing-up, is far inferior to the better class of Southern people. I do not believe the world ever saw or will ever again see, unless the millennium comes, such high state of civilization and culture and exalted virtue as was the Southern states prior to the war. I have yet to find one Yankee, thought I do not say there are none, who, when the money test is made, will not for his own interest do some small or little thing, and often mean thing, if it is to his advantage to do so.

Writing as I now do after the lapse of nearly 40 years (and years do soften, and old age ought to) one may somewhat judge my feeling about the Yankees when the war ended. — George Benjamin West

What's the last thing you remember?" I ask instead. "Dancing." "You were at a bar, a nightclub? In Boston?" It takes her a bit, but finally, "Y-y-yes." "Did you drink too much?" A small hiccup I take to be yes. Kids, I think. We're all so young and fearless once. Nightclubs are nothing but a source of adventure. And a fourth, fifth, sixth rum runner the best idea in the world. I hated myself for my own stupidity, waking up in a coffin-size box. Minute after minute, day after day, so much time to do nothing but repent. And — Lisa Gardner

What sort of man is this, who over and over again, gave numerous details about His death, months before it occurred, and added to each such utterance that on the third day after His decease He would rise again from the dead - and DID RISE, as even the city of Jerusalem soon came to believe? No other founder of a great world religion (or a small one) ever made such statements, or ever came forth from the dead. — Wilbur Moorehead Smith

Well, after that she would do her best. That was the only way. You did not want things for yourself. That made you small. That kept you safe. That meant you could move smoothly through the world without upsetting every applecart you came across. And if you were careful, if you were a proper part of things, then you could help. You mended what was cracked. You tended to the things you found askew. And you trusted that the world in turn would brush you up against the chance to eat. It was the only graceful way to move. All else was vanity and pride. — Patrick Rothfuss

A light was on in the kitchen. His mother sat at the kitchen table, as still as a statue. Her hands were clasped together, and she stared fixatedly at a small stain on the tablecloth. Gregor remembered seeing her that way so many nights after his dad had disappeared. He didn't know what to say. He didn't want to scare her or shock her or ever give her any more pain.
So, he stepped into the light of the kitchen and said the one thing he knew she wanted to hear most in the world.
Hey, Mom. We're home. — Suzanne Collins

So many of the new nations which were established as democracies after the second world war, during the decolonizing process, have now changed their system to state-socialism. Small elites run them, and they aren't sharing societies. They aren't even socialist. The power of the state has been merged with business property and you have the greatest concentration of power that's possible. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

But it's a changeable world! When we consider how great our sorrow seem, and how small they are; how we think we shall die of grief, and how quickly we forget, I think we ought to be ashamed of ourselves and our fickle-heartedness. For, after all, what business has Time to bring us consolation? — William Makepeace Thackeray

My wife and I were invited to have lunch with one of the wealthiest men in the world. He was seventy-five years old. Tears came down his cheeks. "I am the most miserable man in the world," he said. I have everything anyone could ever want. If I want to go anywhere, I have my own yacht or private plane. But down inside I'm miserable and empty." Shortly after, I met another man who preached in a small church nearby. He was vivacious and full of life, and he told us, "I don't have a penny to my name, but I'm the happiest man in the world! — Billy Graham

History lesson, folks: The tax system we have today - the one we've come to know and love - began ninety-four years ago as a (drum roll, please) flat tax! The monstrosity you see today is a flat tax on income after nearly a century of very imperfect evolution. At first, only a very small percentage of Americans were asked to pay income tax. In fact, that's how they sold it to us - as a tax on the rich!
Well, that all changed with World War II. The cost of the war effort led to an expansion of those who paid federal income taxes - and we were off to the races. The tax code was flattened again, if you will, in 1986. Since that time it has been amended 16,000 times. We now have more than 67,000 pages of statutes and regulations - which helps explain why, last year, nearly two-thirds of all tax filers had to seek professional help with their tax return. — Neal Boortz

This is the truth: We are a nation accustomed to being afraid. If I'm being honest, not just with you but with myself, it's not just the nation, and it's not just something we've grown used to. It's the world, and it's an addiction. People crave fear. Fear justifies everything. Fear makes it okay to have surrendered freedom after freedom, until our every move is tracked and recorded in a dozen databases the average man will never have access to. Fear creates, defines, and shapes our world, and without it, most of us would have no idea what to do with ourselves. Our ancestors dreamed of a world without boundaries, while we dream new boundaries to put around our homes, our children, and ourselves. We limit our potential day after day in the name of a safety that we refuse to ever achieve. We took a world that was huge with possibility, and we made it as small as we could. — Mira Grant

There were protocols to meet for the historic occasion. On the lunar dust they placed mementoes for the five-deceased American and Soviet spacemen, Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee, Vladimir Komarov, and Yuri Gagarin (who died in a plane crash in 1968). They unsheathed a metal disc on the descent stage with engraved messages to future moon visitors. As Neil Armstrong read the plaque's words, his voice carried throughout the world. "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969, AD. We came in peace for all mankind." There was yet another small cargo - private and precious - carried by Neil Armstrong to the moon. It was not divulged at the time, but he carried the diamond-studded astronaut pin made especially for Deke Slayton by the three Apollo 1 astronauts and presented to him by their widows after that dreadful fire. — Alan Shepard

Your life is not little, and your playing small doesn't serve
the world. Your living large, on the other hand-your being
your true self despite fear, fatigue, doubt, and opposition-
will serve the world more than you can imagine. In fact, it
may help save it. And saving the world, after all, is
what all heroes (including you) are here to do. — Martha Beck

Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world. — Gloria Steinem

I feel grateful to be this size; after all, if I weren't small and had not achieved these world records, I might never have been able to visit Japan and Europe and many other wonderful countries. — Jyoti Amge

If you have a story to tell, put it out there. Get the thing done. No excuses. No procrastinating. No apologies. It will never be as good as you want it to be, so forget about perfection. Just be satisfied that you've done the best work you can do at this stage in your life as an author. Then roll the rocket onto the launch pad and fire it off. After that, write another story. Always keep going. Move fast. Stay one step ahead of the forces of distraction and self-doubt. Love your characters enough to give them a good home. Love your readers enough to give them a place of refuge from life's tragedies, big and small. And love the world you live in enough to make it the world of your dreams. — James Hampton

I record the events of my life, filling up one notebook after another. Maybe I'm not getting the details exactly right, but it doesn't matter. The strict facts hold no currency here. What counts is the saliva I just spat on this very sheet of paper. The thick gob slowly dissolves a small circle in the text and turns the words translucent. The ink starts to bleed. The fibers loosen. If you run your fingers along this paragraph, you'll find the site where I stabbed my thumb straight through the page. There is an entire world in that hole. — Jeff Jackson

People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us; and this goes on to the end. And after all, what can we call our own, except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favor. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It was as though the whole world was thrown back six or seven hundred years without having the organizations those ancient peoples had." He paused, breathing heavily. "Of course, there were many survivors who understood small skills. Some of them would repair small engines, but they couldn't manufacture them. They couldn't refine fuels. Fortunately a good many doctors who had practiced in small towns and in the country survived. They had their medical books, but they could no longer get the drugs they needed. Anyway, medicine survived after a fashion. Then gradually little patterns of order began to appear and another Bureaucracy came into being. — Hugh MacLennan

you were to ask Christians around the world what God wants from the people he has saved, most would probably answer "obedience." There is great truth in that answer, but it is not enough. If the sovereign God's primary goal in sanctifying believers is simply to make us more holy, it is hard to explain why most of us make only "small beginnings" on the road to personal holiness in this life, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it (see Catechism Q. 113). In reality, God wants something much more precious in our lives than mere outward conformity to his will. After all, obedience is tricky business and can be confusing to us. We can be obedient outwardly while sinning wildly on the inside, as the example of the Pharisees makes clear. In fact, many of my worst sins have been committed in the context of my best obedience. — Barbara R. Duguid

I make a point to appreciate all the little things in my life. I go out and smell the air after a good, hard rain. I re-read passages from my favorite books. I hold the little treasures that somebody special gave me. These small actions help remind me that there are so many great, glorious pieces of good in the world. — Dolly Parton

One of the best tricks a garden plays is that you never quite remember how it's going to be, that first day after winter has gone, when you go outside and can stay outside all day fiddling with jobs that aren't pressing enough to weigh heavily but will nevertheless pay dividends. A garden is made up of a thousand small inventions, but each small act is a defence (defiance even) against a world without anchors or safe harbours. — Anna Pavord

Well, he replied, finally letting my hand go so that he could gesticulate with his; you don your khakis, schlep off to some jungle, hang out with the natives, fish and hunt with them, shiver from their fevers, drink strange brew fermented in their virgins' mouths, and all the rest; then, after about a year, they lug your bales and cases down to the small jetty that connects their tiny world to the big one that they kind of know exists, but only as an abstract concept, like adultery for children; and, waving with big, gap-toothed smiles, they send you back to your study - where, khakis swapped for cotton shirt and tie, saliva-liquor for the Twinings, tisane or iced Scotch your housekeeper purveys you on a tray, you write the book: that's what I mean, he said. Not just a book: the fucking Book. You write the Book on them. Sum their tribe up. Speak its secret name. — Tom McCarthy

It was called 'We Wear the Mask', by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I transcribed the first stanza and then started jotting down my reaction to it.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, -
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

I used to wear masks so subtle I barely noticed them. A compliment to my mother after a dismal meal, a smile at my best friend when she sang out of tune, a forced laugh at my uncle's bad jokes. I wore small masks that came and went, like fleeting expressions.

I am stuck inside the mask I wear now. I want to rip it off. I want to show my scars to the world, to unveil the ugliness that breathes inside me. I want to be unashamed. I want to be unafraid. But every day the mask gets tighter, and I suffocate a little more.

I stopped writing. — Catherine Doyle

Jesus is building his Church, not only by constitutions and codes, but by shaping hearts and minds to his way of life. We are a family, not a firm, scattered and yet gathered. Biblical equality is not the endgame; it is one of the means to God's big ending: all things redeemed, all things restored. Jesus feminism is only one thread in God's beautiful woven story of redemption. Begin here: right at the feet of Jesus. Look to Love, and yes, our Jesus - he will guide you in your steps, one after another, in these small ways until you come at last to love the whole world. — Sarah Bessey

I forced myself to let my belly relax into a deeper breath. I closed my eyes and felt the solidity of the pavement beneath my feet and the rock beneath that, felt the density of the earth hugging me to it, felt it spinning on its axis, felt it hurtling through space in its trip around the sun, felt th solar system whirling through space as part of our galaxy, felt the flight of galaxies escaping from the site of that primal explosion we call the big bang. Always in times of stress, if I contemplated the vastness of the universe, I did in some measure relax, comforted by the knowledge that I was but a small speck in creation after all, a mote in the enormity of God's eye, a fleeting arrangement of atoms that would in due time cycle back into the earth from which I had come and be reshuffled into something else, blended back into the grace of the natural world. In my very insignificance did I find my immortality. pp 113-114 — Sarah Andrews

Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world. — Carl Sagan

Oh, how a small portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living! — Shiv Khera

By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes (neatly brushed) - Gandalf came by. Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him, and I have only heard very little of all there is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale. Tales and adventures sprouted up all over the place wherever he went, in the most extraordinary fashion. He had not been down that way under The Hill for ages and ages, not since his friend the Old Took died, in fact, and the hobbits had almost forgotten what he looked like. He had been away over The Hill and across The Water on businesses of his own since they were all small hobbit-boys and hobbit-girls. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count. — Andrei Tarkovsky

The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board is established in 1946 in an effort to discover the cause of the brown cloud hanging over the city and decide how to combat and disperse it. In 1949, after intense lobbying from both the automobile and oil industries, and against the recommendations and position of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board, the public rail system, which at one time was the largest in the world, and still serves a majority of the city's population, is decommissioned and torn out. It is replaced by a small fleet of buses. — James Frey

Why don't people talk about Japan's wartime emperor Hirohito in the same breath as people do about Germany's Hitler? After all, both had an almost similar role in instigating World War II. In the West, whether it is good or bad, people take full responsibility for their actions, and they have total freedom to express their true feelings. On the contrary, here in the East, it is always the small people who take the blame and are made scapegoats. That is, for you and me, the difference between the West and the East, my friend."

My 7th book is coming....! — Tim I. Gurung

For a long time," he said at last, "when I was small, I pretended to myself that I was the bastard of some great man. All orphans do this, I think," he added dispassionately."It makes life easier to bear, to pretend that it will not always be as it is, that someone will come and restore you to your rightful place in the world."
He shrugged.
"Then I grew older, and knew that this was not true. No one would come to rescue me. But then-" he turned his head and gave Jamie a smile of surpassing sweetness.
"Then I grew older still, and discovered that after all, it was true. I am the son of a great man."
The hook touched Jamie's hand, hard and capable.
"I wish for nothing more. — Diana Gabaldon

To me, enlightenment is a big shift inside your eyes, a different way to use your mind so you can understand some of God, some of Jesus. But it is maybe not one shift, but many small shifts. You change your spiritual condition - by prayer, by meditation, by the way you live, the way you decide to think, by the lessons you learn in living this life with a good intention - and then, when this happens, after a long times or a short times, the way you see the world changes. — Roland Merullo