Outsized Quotes & Sayings

A lot of the children I photograph are extremely colorfully dressed in some way. But I also find a lot of kids with outsized personalities or who happen to be doing something charming. — Brandon Stanton

Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere. — Marilynne Robinson

As Einstein's quote suggests, the framing of the question is an outsized portion of the solution-finding process. And as Clay Christensen told us, when you ask the right question, the answer becomes mechanical. Clearly, we need to be privileging that question-framing process, which has a rhythm of introspection and collaboration, throughout our processes. — Faisal Hoque

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Do you remember in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! when the Grinch is alone on the mountain after plundering the Christmas of the Whos down below, and his heart swells to three times its normal size? That's the other thing that happens when you become a mom. You feel more deeply. You become capable of a raw, scary fullness of emotion that tenderizes the hardened muscle of the heart. And it endangers you. Because you feel for other people's suffering more than you used to, especially for the suffering of children, as if the love you bear for your child is so outsized that it can't be contained but splashes out into the world, your salty tears brimming the salty oceans. — Beth Ann Fennelly

This gray little town fifty miles north of Paris acquired an outsized reputation for royal scandal, misbehavior, and debauchery, which in eighteenth-century France was saying something. — Tom Reiss

Florida has its own rhythm, too. People go to work, they watch their children learn and grow and start families of their own. They play in the sun and pass their lives enjoying the outsized blessings that make our state unique. — Jeb Bush

Wall Street's outsized influence in our nation's capital is something I've talked about for a long time - long before I even thought about running for office. But where I see a problem - an infestation, really - a lot of others in Washington, both Democrats and Republicans, seem to see government working just fine. — Elizabeth Warren

The rise in obesity is the predictable result of the rise in manufactured deliciousness. Everything we add to food just makes us want it more. And no matter how hard we try, we can't make our outsized desires go away. If anything, we're lucky, inexplicably so, that only 8.3 percent of women and 4.4 percent of men have a BMI consistent with total food addiction. But remember the children...The percentage of slender Americans will gradually work its way down to zero. (82) — Mark Schatzker

The Unexpected stalks a farm in big boots like a vagrant bent on havoc. Not every farmer is an inventor, but the good ones have the seeds of invention within them. Economy and efficiency move their relentless tinkering and yet the real motive often seems to be aesthetic. The mind that first designed a cutter bar is not far different from a mind that can take the intractable steel of an outsized sickle blade and make it hum in the end. The question is how to reduce the simplicity that constitutes a problem ("It's simple; it's broke.") to the greater simplicity that constitutes a solution. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

Causes was founded with the mission of empowering anyone to change the world. Our model is based upon the belief that everyone has the power to have an outsized impact on the world by banding together with other like-minded individuals, taking direct action, and inspiring their friends and their friends' friends to join in. — Joe Green

The economy may be complex, but Americans understand that the Wall Street banks control an outsized portion of the economy and that they have an outsized interest in their own profits. — Marcy Kaptur

Britain helped create the Internet - Tim Berners Lee created the World Wide Web, one of a long line of British scientists who have given us an outsized role in shaping our own digital future. — George Osborne

Before long, the policy of putting quotas on oranges went from bad to worse. A Navel Orange Administrative Committee created by the Department of Agriculture began setting the policy, and Sunkist, a titan in the orange industry, was given outsized influence over the committee. — Mike Lee

Hemingway's talent was so outsized, that I feel like I can forgive him a lot of his trespasses to have achieved what he did achieve. — Lesley M.M. Blume

Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder. And it leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system in Washington is rigged against them - that our elected representatives aren't looking out for the interests of most Americans. — Barack Obama

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit. — David Sedaris

Perfection is not real. Perfection is not human. Carlos is not perfect- no, even better- he is imperfect. Everything about him, and us, and all of this is imperfect. And those imperfections in our reality are the seams and cracks into which our outsized love can seep and pool. — Cecil Baldwin

What's awesome about the Internet is how it breaks up monopolistic markets where middlemen unfairly gobble up outsized fees, leaving us little choice but to keep paying them. — Sarah Lacy

Most large media firms make outsized investments to acquire and market a small number of titles with strong hit potential, and bank on their sales to make up for middling performance in the rest of their catalogs. — Anita Elberse

Newt Gingrich has a restless and outsized intelligence that is tragically unleavened by any kind of critical sensibility. — John Podhoretz

And too intense a longing, everyone knows, can lead to poor decisions, rash actions, hopes that become outsized and in turn deform reality — Chang-rae Lee

Alexander was silent. "Now you're really tiny," he said at last. "I'm not tiny," she returned. "You're just outsized." Blushing, she lowered her gaze. — Paullina Simons

We shoot our heroes and enjoy peripeteia as a spectacle akin to sport and perhaps harshly disavowing the past protects us from the disappointment of our outsized hopes--who knows, really, but shifts in taste don't fully account for the phenomenon. At any rate, nearly everything urgent and alive becomes doo-wop down the road, at least in this country's pop culture, and along the way a somewhat self-hating irony lays waste not only to the work but to the desires it once carried. It's like we die into adulthood. — Charles D'Ambrosio

I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness. — David Remnick

The conservative side of our political spectrum has had an outsized voice over the last few years. I think especially since the establishment of Fox News, which has created an echo chamber in which people just hear the same ideas repeated ad infinitum. And you know, it's just basic advertising, basically. You hear the same idea over and over again. Or you can call it propaganda if you like. — Bruce Bartlett

She walked right on past, ignoring him just like she chose to ignore the way nature had tagged her with those outsized badges of femininity, just like she was above him, and sex, and everything else that's weak and of the flesh. — Ken Kesey

All small returns are noise. To transcend the noise and the risk, seek outsized returns from technological paradigms. — George Gilder

Found in a small stone cave bitten from the roadside, stitchless save for his great outsized boots and a plague of flies, fat on the human scrappage of dinners long past, Toad squatted in the slitted stomach of a warm child, eating loudly the face of her hapless, headless father, who sat a good foot off the ground impaled up the ass on a pointed post. — Nick Cave

One doesn't have to be fond of a person to make use of them." "That explains what the patron gets out of it, but not what the ingenii gets for betraying their own kind." Isabel taps her outsized, ragged-glass thumbnail against the table. "Ladies write editorials declaring they don't wish for the vote," she says, with something hovering between exaggerated patience and quite the reverse. "Mill-hands testify in courts of law that if they are forced to work in conditions of greater safety their children will starve. People do things that run counter to their own interests all the time. Why would ingenii be any different?" "Isabel, I'm sorry, but I cannot think about female suffrage or the rights of mill-hands just this instant," I say, and rest my forehead on my palm. — Ankaret Wells

To give in completely to the instinctual urgings born from individual selection would be to dissolve society. At the opposite extreme, to surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn us into angelic robots - the outsized equivalents of ants. — Edward O. Wilson

Later you referenced that anecdote to illustrate that my expectations were always preposterously outsized; that my very ravenousness for the exotic was self-destructive, because as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn't count. — Lionel Shriver

Groups that advocate open government have argued that it's vital to know the names of White House visitors, who may have an outsized influence on policy matters. — Bill Dedman

thus had a somewhat outsized sense of her own importance relative to the universe's grand scheme. — Sharon Guskin

A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist. — Louis Menand

Guerrilla marketers do not rely on the brute force of an outsized marketing budget. Instead, they rely on the brute force of a vivid imagination. — Jay Conrad Levinson