Outsize Quotes & Sayings

The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with an outsize intensity. These were the things that had been solidified in my mind by reiteration, that recurred in dreams and daily thoughts: certain faces, certain conversations, which, taken as a group, represented a secure version of the past that I had been constructing since 1992. But there was another, irruptive, sense of things past. The sudden reencounter in the present, of something or someone long forgotten, some part of myself I had relegated to childhood and to Africa. — Teju Cole

Here is my recipe for a mood enhancer. Take a friend, preferably one with a really annoying fringe and outsize pants, and when she is rambling on swiftly, push her into a ditch and run away. — Louise Rennison

As I sat here, absorbed in my needlework, the urge to consult the orb overpowered me. I arose, I settled myself before it, and I gazed into its crystalline depths . . . and what do you think I saw gazing back at me?" "An ugly old bat in outsize specs?" Ron muttered under his breath. — J.K. Rowling

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object. — Howard Hodgkin

Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects. — David Byrne

In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies. All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive - as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little. But my outsize emotions were well represented in books. [] there simmered all the feelings no one ever admits to. — Betsy Lerner

Dear Maya,
Life is an illusion.
And as it turns out, so is death.
What is real?
What remains when we all fade away?
Two things: Love. Forgiveness.
Don't forget — Cathy Ostlere

For a tiny speck in the Atlantic, Ireland has made an outsize contribution to world literature. It's a legacy we can all be proud of, one that would take many pages (or indeed a whole library of books) to recount in full. — Rashers Tierney

Over the years, I've worried that my directness could come off as brusque or my criticisms heard in an outsize way, especially by male colleagues. I sometimes wondered whether expressing even my mildest reservation reminded someone of a chastising mother or complaining wife. — Jill Abramson

Cat. No doubled vision: it's a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it's a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right — Charles Stross

Jutta drags herself closer; she watches her brother with outsize eyes. A piano chases the violins. Then woodwinds. The strings sprint, woodwinds fluttering behind. More instruments join in. Flutes? Harps? The song races, seems to loop back over itself. "Werner?" Jutta whispers. He blinks; — Anthony Doerr

My strength is breaking people down. I may not outrun or outsize you, but I will make you miss. — Priest Holmes

It seemed to Chickadee that those houses held the powers of the world. The ones who built and lived in those houses were making an outsize world. An existence he'd never dreamed of. Almost a spirit world, but one on earth. Chickadee could see that they used up forests of trees in making the houses. He could see that they were pumping up the river and even using up the animals. He thought of the many animals whose dead hides were bound and sold in St. Paul in one day. Everything that the Anishinabeg counted on in life, and loved, was going into this hungry city mouth. This mouth, this city, was wide and insatiable. it would never be satisfied, thought Chickadee dizzily, until everything was gone. — Louise Erdrich

The magnitude of Fort Peck in his telling of it gripped me the way the notion of a thirty-year winter had, and Zoe's magical presence in the back room, and the selection of the Medicine Lodge as the most pleasurable of all the saloons in the state, and family fame in newspapers far and wide, and Delano Roberston arriving in a cloud of sheep, the entire cascade of this one-of-a-kind year; the idea of outsize life, the feeling of being present as things happened way beyond ordinary in human experience. I suppose it was something like a mental fever, the headiest kind to have. Ever since Pop consolidated his thinking there in the hallway of the house, where my finger snap still echoed, my imagination and I knew no limits, and at twelve or at any other known age, there is no spell more dizzying. — Ivan Doig

Looking back, one can almost imagine them stalking through the wild with specimen bottles and outsize nets, in determined pursuit of the Ojibwa adverb or the Cherokee pronoun. — Margalit Fox

Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that's too strong, at least fairly high anxiety. — Dick Cavett

At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins. — W.G. Sebald

Because revelations of systemic deception erode our most basic, default expectation of good faith, they play an outsize role in producing a crisis of authority. Each exposure of previously secret misdeeds - steroid use, Ponzi schemes, rigged intelligence - produces an acute and debilitating psychological effect. Vertigo sets in, similar to that experienced by a spouse who, after decades of what he thought was a happy, loyal marriage, discovers his wife has been cheating all along. Suddenly we realize we live in a world entirely more depraved than the one we thought we inhabited. — Christopher L. Hayes

Miss Petrowska,an excellent pianist, held the audience transfixed with Chou Wen-chung's work. Miss Petrowska was coolness itself in getting the hardware into the piano and out again ... in Messiaen, a feeling for the music's reverent sobriety combined to produce an absorbing performance. — Donal Henahan

Here was a separate world, with different wrestlers and a wholly different concept of the wrestling enterprise. Where the NWA as a whole - and GCW in particular - had become increasingly gritty and realistic, the WWF was gaudy and cartoonish, a parade of outsize gimmickry. Where GCW was filled with angst, the WWF was all bombast. If GCW was a well-choreographed brawl in a bar parking lot, the WWF had the glittery sheen of a major boxing spectacle. They were in many ways similar, but to the Southern fan attuned to the traditional NWA sensibility, the WWF couldn't have been more alien. — David Shoemaker

because, no matter how he'd come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes. — Jonathan Franzen

It's easy enough to foist your music collection on your kids. Lectures are not required; you just play the stuff while they are prisoner in the back seat on a long drive, or softly in the background while eating dinner. — Dean Wareham

Basically it's a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they'll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity. (Hey, wait a minute, doesn't this one have thumbs?) — Charles Stross

And if that's the case
if we are our remembering selves
then it matters far less how we feel moment to moment with our children. They play rich and crucial roles in our life stories, generating both outsize highs and outsize lows. Without such complexity, we don't feel like we've amounted to much. "You don't have a good story until something deviates from the expected," says McAdams. "And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings. — Jennifer Senior

You can't change the world, you can only change yourself. — Beatrice Wood

Inej's mother and father might still shed tears for the daughter they'd lost, but if Inej died tonight, there would be no one to grieve for the girl she was now. — Leigh Bardugo

Despite Marc Andreessen's and Peter Thiel's belief that the outsize gains of tech billionaires are the result of a genius entrepreneur culture, inequality at this scale is a choice - the result of the laws and taxes that we as a society choose to establish. — Jonathan Taplin

There was a scavenging peasant moving about, whistling as he worked, with an outsize gunny sack on his back. The whitened knuckles of the hand which gripped the sack revealed his determined frame of mind; the whistling, which was piercing but tuneful, showed that he was keeping his spirits up. The whistle echoed around the field, bouncing off fallen helmets, resounding hollowly from the barrels of mud-blocked rifles, sinking without trace into the fallen boots of the strange, strange crops, whose smell, like the smell of unfairness, was capable of bringing tears to the buddha's eyes. The crops were dead, having been hit by some unknown blight ... and most of them, but not all, wore the uniforms of the West Pakistani Army. Apart from the whistling, the only noises to be heard were the sounds of objects dropping into the peasant's treasure-sack: leather belts, watches, gold tooth-fillings, spectacle frames, tiffin-carriers, water flasks, boots. — Salman Rushdie

The fossil fuel industry commands outsize sway over U.S. politics, markets, and democracy. I knew these companies were formidable, but when I served on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, I got a close up view of how the industry disregards government safeguards. — Frances Beinecke