Quotes & Sayings About Shrinking World

I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I live in a shrinking world where the only thing I can trust is Maven's obsession. Like the manacles, it is a shield and a slow, smothering death. — Victoria Aveyard

Not everybody has to be a parent. In fact, in an overpopulated world where our resources are shrinking, it would be wonderful if people who didn't want children felt free to say so. In the 1970s, there was more tolerance for the idea that not everybody needs to be a biological parent. — Erica Jong

the world was shrinking, sympathies changing; — Barack Obama

We are now edging across the boundary - always a porous one - between self-justification and fantasy. Matthews' story is by no means a complete fantasy: we can recognise every event. But the frame of reference is somehow shrinking, and momentous world events being rewritten around the actions of a minor player. — Mike Jay

The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance. — Donald Barthelme

Ultimately, I hoped the tiny-house guy was similar to me: a sane person without a big agenda, who simply wanted a way to make sense of the world, to create a new map with a big X in the middle labeled "Home," even if that meant shrinking his world down to the size of an area rug. — Dee Williams

It is an age lurching along the lip of a dark precipice, peeking fearfully into chaos's empty eyes, enrapt, like a giddy rat trying to stare down a hungry cobra. The gods are restless, tossing and turning and wakening in snippets to conspire at mischief. Their bastard offspring, the hundred million spirits of rock and brook and tree, of place and time and emotion, find old constraints are rotting. The Postern of Fate stands ajar. The world faces an age of fear, of conflict, of grand sorcery, of great change, and of greater despair amongst mortal men. And the cliffs of ice creep forward.
Great kings walk the earth. They cannot help but collide. Great ideas sweep back and forth aross the face of a habitable world that is shrinking. Those cannot help but fire hatred and fear amongst adherents of dogmas and doctrines under increasing pressure.
As always, those who do the world's work most dearly pay the price of the world's pain. — Glen Cook

We ... write to heighten our own awareness of life ... We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it ... to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth ... to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely ... When I don't write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I lose my fire, my color. — Anais Nin

The world is shrinking as we see more and more of it in the media, and the more we see of the world, the smaller we are, the more aware we are of how insignificant any one of us is. — Jock Sturges

A greedy insistence that the whole of nature and life must present itself to our voracious demand for instantaneous intelligibility is a symptom of all world-shrinking ideology, whether religiously fundamentalist or scientifically materialist. In — John F. Haught

I think you can't deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking. — Andrew Solomon

The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree. — W.E.B. Du Bois

The fort.
Where the pair stored their painted scenes and books of made-up languages, their two-man band, and the tiny matchbox bed plus accessories that they made in case, someday, their experiments in the world of shrinking finally panned out. — Michelle Cuevas

When I first came out of Argentina to Europe, the flight took 36 hours. Now it takes 12 hours, and the world is still shrinking. — Juan Manuel Fangio

It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. It's symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experiences. In the later stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun. — Trevanian

Now, at a point when the entire world seems mired in violence and cynicism, when the Church is shrinking, the environment being poisoned, when good souls are giving up hope, when greed and bitterness seem to be gaining at the expense of kindness and compassion - now, I believe, we have been given a divine help. — Roland Merullo

And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go? — Ian McEwan

Their detectors, like everything else about them and their small, shrinking world, were always looking for the wrong weapons, Sem thought as he began to sharpen his pencil. — Jason Heller

More than ever, the world needs good engineers. However, the pool of talent is shrinking not growing. — Dean Kamen

The beauty of Twitter is that more and more people are flocking to it because it's shrinking their world. — Dick Costolo

Every crack is also an opening. When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world. Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment - growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking - the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn't die, but falls into the world. — Mark Nepo

Neurosis may be called a negating of possibilities; it is the shrinking up of one's world. The development of the self is this radically curtailed. — Rollo May

You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. — Anais Nin

We all live our lives blindly believing in the people who make the decisions. Believing in science. Because the world is inscrutable and all information is hazy. We accept the existence of a round globe, of an atom's nucleus that sticks together like drops, of a shrinking universe
and the necessity of interfering with genetic material. Not because we know these things are true, but because we believe the people who tell us so. we are all proselytes of science. And, in contrast to the followers of other religions, we can no longer bridge the gap between ourselves and the priests. Problems arise when we stumble on an outright lie. And it affects our own lives ... that of a child who for the first time catches his parents in a lie he had always suspected. — Peter Hoeg

Writers and scholars have emerged in recent times (some familiar, some new) to continue to challenge the notion of a literature that encompasses the world - and reaffirms our existence in it. It is a multicultural vision that embraces and includes our shrinking universe; it is a multicultural vision that the white man fears and a vision that the rest of us can celebrate. — Jessica Hagedorn

Try to remember this: what you project Is what you will perceive; what you perceive With any passion, be it love or terror, May take on whims and powers of its own. Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection Will serve you best - unless you overdo it, Watching your step too narrowly, refusing To specify a world, shrinking your purview To a tight vision of your inching shoes, Which may, as soon as you come to think, be crossing An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle. — Richard Wilbur

I realized that I was connected to Africa. I wasn't just a Colored girl. I was part of a whole world that wanted a better life. I'm part of a majority and not a minority. My life has been a life of growth. If you're not growing, you're not going to understand real love. If you're not reaching out to help others then you're shrinking. My life has been active. I'm not a spectator — Assata Shakur

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever. — Cormac McCarthy

The world was different in the morning. Quiet, unassuming, and somehow bigger, as if it was brimming with possibility. It was, she thought, as if during the day the world went through a shrinking process, gradually condensing the morning's expansion, only to inflate again during the night — H.J. Gerald

Whitman himself "accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the "grey sick faces of onanists," etc., etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The "democratic vistas" have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilisation as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude and become a passive attitude - even "decadent," if that word means anything. — George Orwell

What was I supposed to do with this cyclone of emotions? I was melting and shrinking one second, enraged and erupting the next. I wanted to pass out - no - more - I wanted to grab the world by the scruff of its miserable neck and shake it until it behaved. I felt the dire need to exit by force any world that would let such events transpire. And — Anne McAneny

Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. But compassion, the generation of compassion, actually mobilizes our immunity. — Joan Halifax

The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter. — Don DeLillo

People view us and our vampires as abominations," Ghastek said. "They call the undead inhuman, not realizing the irony: only humans are capable of inhumanity. Four thousand years of technology, with magic shrinking to a mere trickle before the Shift, yet the world was just as evil then as it is now. It's not vampires or werewolves who committed the worst atrocities, but average people. They are the serial killers, the child rapists, the inquisitors, the witch hunters, the perpetrators of monstrous deeds. The shackles on my wall are the symbol of humanity's capacity for cruelty. I keep them to remind myself that I must fear those who fear me. — Ilona Andrews

You playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightening about shrinking so others won't feel insecure around you. As you let your own light shine, you indirectly give others permission to do the same. — Marianne Williamson

He slipped away slowly, withdrawing from this world by small, imperceptible degrees, and in the end it was as if
he were a drop of water evaporating in the sun, shrinking and shrinking until at last he wasn't there anymore. — Paul Auster

When it comes to letting the world in on the secrets of his heart, he has about as much shrinking reticence as a steam calliope. — P.G. Wodehouse

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. — Marianne Williamson

In this shrinking world, it is futile to seek safety behind geographical barriers. Real security will be found only in law and in justice. — Harry S. Truman

I kept thinking, as I was telling Didi, that somehow what was in my head
in my memory, in my thoughts
was not being translated fully into the world. I felt as though three-dimensional people and events were becoming two-dimensional in the telling, and as though they were smaller as well as flatter, that they were just less for being spoken. What was missing was the intense emotion that I felt, which, like water or youth itself, buoyed these small insignificant encounters into all that they meant to me. There they were, shrinking before my eyes, shrinking into my words. Anything that can be said, can be said clearly. Anything that cannot be said clearly, cannot be said. — Claire Messud

Modern communications don't shrink the world, they make it bigger. Faster planes make it bigger. They give us more, they connect more things. The world isn't shrinking at all. People who say it's shrinking have never flown Air Zaire in a tropical storm. No wonder people go to school to learn stretching and bending. The world is so big and complicated we don't trust ourselves to figure out anything on our own. No wonder people read books that tell them how to run, walk and sit. We're trying to keep up with the world, the size of it, the complications. — Don DeLillo

As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension.
It was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn't occur to me what wasn't there. My appetite for pictures and videos and news and music was so gigantic now that if something was shrinking, something immesurable, how would I notice?
... Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine loosing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time. — Miranda July

It is my opinion that education is a key component to peace and progress. Despite their arrogant claims to have all the answers, world religions cannot account for recent insights and discoveries about the natural world and human history. In this, the most tantalizing argument against religious faith comes forth in the way of science and reason. An ever-growing scientific consensus has resulted in the ever-shrinking populous of religious relevance. — Tommy Rodriguez

You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure about you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. — Marianne Williamson

The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world. — Victor Hugo

Dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality. — Muriel Rukeyser