Quotes & Sayings About The World Being Small

Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture. It's striking that Russian propaganda, in the criticisms it makes of us, always holds itself within certain limits. Stalin, that cunning Caucasian, is apparently quite ready to abandon European Russia, if he thinks that a failure to solve her problems would cause him to lose everything. Let nobody think Stalin might reconquer Europe from the Urals! It is as if I were installed in Slovakia, and could set out from there to reconquer the Reich. This is the catastrophe that will cause the loss of the Soviet Empire. — Adolf Hitler

I was a 36C or D, and at 5' 1', I knew that being a small person with big boobs standing in front of an audience was not going to be easy. It would be really hard to get people to pay attention to me without mocking me. Getting a breast reduction to prepare for my career was no different from people who work to get good grades to get into a good college to get into a good graduate school to get a good job. I went down to a B cup, and it was the best thing in the whole world. — Janeane Garofalo

Watch everything she does. You can tell what a woman wants and needs by simply observing her. Even when you two are out spending time together, chillaxing at home, or getting ready for date night. The little things as I said mean a lot to a woman, so with that being stated; start by remembering things like her birthdays, anniversaries, or special events that's significant to you both. Those things may be small to you, but means the world to her. — Will Ag Martel

Thomas's mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that. — Ben Marcus

I sleep for an entire day. And when I wake up I'm a new person. I'm empty. I've cried out everything I had in me. I'm an empty shell waiting to be filled with what comes next. Or I'm just being a total drama queen. I'm not empty. I'm still a person. I cried over a bad thing that happened in my life, but I probably shouldn't have. Compared to Mom's crisis, mine was small. Compared to a thousand other girls' around the world, mine is insignificant. It wasn't bad. Not compared to everyone else. It was just a couple seconds. It wasn't years. It wasn't months, like Mom. It wasn't a family member. Wasn't someone I see anymore. It didn't even hurt. There was no blood. It wasn't bad. Not compared to others'. So I should stop crying. — Sara Wolf

I cried out for the pain of man,
I cried out for my bitter wrath
Against the hopeless life that ran
For ever in a circling path
From death to death since all began;
Till on a summer night
I lost my way in the pale starlight
And saw our planet, far and small,
Through endless depths of nothing fall
A lonely pin-prick spark of light,
Upon the wide, enfolding night,
With leagues on leagues of stars above it,
And powdered dust of stars below-
Dead things that neither hate nor love it
Not even their own loveliness can know,
Being but cosmic dust and dead.
And if some tears be shed,
Some evil God have power,
Some crown of sorrow sit
Upon a little world for a little hour-
Who shall remember? Who shall care for it? — C.S. Lewis

The Harelip had taken off her heavy shawl and draped it over a headstone. The grave was tilted and covered with moss, the name worn away by the weather. The person underneath had been forgotten and was no longer mourned by the world. But for a moment, Ren thought, the small black slate looked warmed, and grateful for being chosen. — Hannah Tinti

I've thought many times, 'I can't write this,' but on my own little planet I found the courage to write it because it was true. I put aside fear of Father being angry with me. It's hard though; the world pales in comparison with the stature of a parent. In some small-consolation way, my parents feel I'm helping people by giving them something to identify with. They feel proud in a sort of reverse way. My mom's proud of the fact that lots of kids look up to me. — Billy Corgan

When there is a huge crack in your relationship with someone, you wonder what others do in similar situations. I realize I'm trying as hard as I can to present myself as the most unthreatening being in the world, like a small animal. I hunch into myself, avoiding going back to the same places I frequented with him. Obviously I don't eat the kind of food we ate or made together. But I don't think I'm going to move to a new house, because I have the kitchen and the large fridge that I'd wanted for so long. People say you can't possibly like your lover every single second of your life. But that's not true. I liked and looked to my lover every single second we were together. And I still can't admit that he's gone. True sorrow is when one person desires but the other doesn't. I don't know any better words to describe it, and I can't yet express this feeling through any kind of food. The one thing we know about sorrow is that it's a very personal, individual feeling. — Kyung-ran Jo

There's something profoundly intense and intoxicating about friendship found en route. It's the bond that arises from being thrust into uncomfortable circumstances, and the vulnerability of trusting others to navigate those situations. It's the exhilaration of meeting someone when we are our most alive selves, breathing new air, high on life-altering moments. It's the discovery of the commonality of the world's people and the attendant rejection of prejudices. It's the humbling experience of being suspicious of a stranger who then extends a great kindness. It's the astonishment of learning from those we set out to teach. It's the intimacy of sharing small spaces, the recognition of a kindred spirit across the globe.
It's the travel relationship, and it can only call itself family. — Lavinia Spalding

The peoples of many countries are being taxed to the point of poverty and starvation ... to enable governments to engage in a mad race in armaments ... This grave menace to the peace of the world is due in no small measure to the uncontrolled activities of the manufacturers and merchants of engines of destruction, and it must be met by the concerted actions of the peoples of all nations. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

If you have ever felt the world melt away when the woman you know is destined to be yours walks into the room; if you have felt your soul reach out to hers, finally making you feel whole; if you tremble when you touch her from sheer awe at being the one who has that right; if the darkness swallows you and you begin to suffocate at the thought of losing her, then you will have a small taste of what it is like to be bonded. Costin — Quinn Loftis

Being a kind, emperor, or president is mighty small potatoes compared to being a mother. Commanding an army is little more than sweeping a street compared with training a boy or girl. The mother of Moses did more for the world than all the kinds that Egypt ever had. Oh, you wait until you reach the mountains of eternity, then read the mothers' names in God's Hall of Fame. — Billy Sunday

I gladly accepted the commission but was uncertain about what the end result would be. On the one hand, Cuban music was conquering the world; being heard everywhere, and our small island was already producing one of the popular musical genres of the 20th century. — Alejo Carpentier

The motivation I possessed to serve my country is what got me out of the small town of Lyons, Texas where I grew up, and into the world of service, love of country, helping others, and being an American soldier." (Page 90). — Kenneth A. Bracewell

One of the things that strikes me most though is how some people don't realise they're self-harming. The phrase 'self-harm' brings up thoughts of 'cutting', but that's only a small portion of it. When you drink excessively to drown your sorrows to the point you throw up and can't see straight and/or, like a girl at my school, ended up being driven to hospital to have her stomach pumped, you've brought harm to yourself. If you take drugs to feel numb and it becomes an addiction that you can't break, you've self-harmed. When you starve yourself or binge eat to fit the latest fashions, you're pushing your body further than it can go.
We need to start treating ourselves how we deserve to be treated, even if you feel that no one else does. Prove to the world you ARE worth something by treating yourself with the utmost respect and hope that other people will follow your example. And even if they don't, at least one person in the world is treating you well: YOU. — Carrie Hope Fletcher

We may live in concrete nests piled on top of each other, we may file in and out of our planes and freeways in neat lines, but we are making it all up as we go along. An ant is born into a complex chemical environment where every small instruction had been laid down in advance. Mother tells the workers what to do and they do everything for the greater good of their enormous family.
In contrast, every human being is capable of working for the advancement of their own procreating, their own minuscule families. Yet we somehow recognize the value of a larger form of society, and readily respond to a larger world beyond our own narrow self-interests. With our unique creative capacity, we have modified ourselves as we have modified our physical conditions, and we have developed an extraordinary division of labor. You and I may be as different as night and day, but that is our strength, and it is precisely this diversification that makes my time in Africa so intensely satisfying. — Craig Packer

In time, most children stop being puzzled in this way. They settle in. The world around them, as it becomes familiar and daily, becomes ordinary. But for writers, like children who have never quite grown up, life retains a quality of strangeness; it remains a matter of questions for which there are no satisfactory answers, of hidden motives, displaced explanations, subtle concealments and mysteries. Eavesdropping of one kind or another, keeping an eye open and an ear cocked, even in public places, for the giveaway facial expression or gesture, the revealing word, becomes a settled habit for the writer, a necessary part of his professional equipment: the laying down of small scraps of information, of observation or experience, for future use. — David Malouf

I think in terms of being a New Yorker, as my friends would say, I don't take a lot of mess. I have no tolerance for people who are not thinking deeply about things. I have no tolerance for the kind of small talk that people need to fill silence. And I have no tolerance for people just not being a part of the world and being in it and trying to change it. — Jacqueline Woodson

When I look at small things, I think I shall go on living: drops of rain, leather gloves shrunk by being wet ... When I look at something too big, I want to die: the Diet Building, or a map of the world ... — Kobo Abe

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere. — John Banville

Thank you," she said.
He looked bemused. "For what?"
"For everything. For being amazing in bed and endlessly patient, for sacrificing the Savage Club for me and bringing me all the way around the world simply because you were worried about me, even though it meant you were probably going to spend your holidays alone. For the way you always put your hand on the small of my back to guide me across the street and the way you let me be in charge of the television remote control and the way you have never, not once, judged me or mistrusted me or made me feel small or unwanted."
"Violet, sweetheart ... " He blinked and she realized that he was close to tears.
Her Martin. Mr. Uptight. Mr. Repressed. — Sarah Mayberry

humanity is populated by the couch critics, the apathetic advisors who, from a detached perch of safety, believe that every whim that breezes over their small minds, and every one of their witless arguments, ought to carry the same weight as the hard-won wisdom of those who are actually in the fight, whose minds have been sharpened with real-world experience, whose legends are being forged by action. — Brendon Burchard

-I am being killed by what keeps me from dying.
And next the sea became very small no bigger than a bathtub. Rolling in pain crashed over and over again onto the edges of the world. Then a divinity fished her out. — Helene Cixous

Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being. — Gregory Maguire

The wonderful thing about praying is that you leave a world of not being able to do something, and enter God's realm where everything is possible. He specializes in the impossible. Nothing is too great for His almighty power. Nothing is too small for His love. — Corrie Ten Boom

This Christianity is not a cultural thing. It is not something that should be just a small part of your life; it is not something that you do on Sunday ... Christianity is not about you being just like the world all the time and then coming to church on Sunday. If that is your Christianity ... you are not Christian. — Paul Washer

Ultimately, making movies is a really, really small world. Being on sets and going to the same locations, like shooting in Shreveport, you're always working with somebody from another set that you worked with. — Taylor Handley

I write. I give intimate private names to an external and foreign world. In a sense, I make it mine. In a sense, I return from feeling exiled and foreign to feeling at home. By doing so, I am already making a small change in what appeared to me earlier as unchangeable. Also, when I describe the impermeable arbitrariness that signs my destiny - arbitrariness at the hands of a human being, or arbitrariness at the hands of fate - I suddenly discover new nuances, subtleties. I discover that the mere act of writing about arbitrariness allows me to feel a freedom of movement in relation to it. That by merely facing up to arbitrariness I am granted freedom - maybe the only freedom a man may have against any arbitrariness: the freedom to put your tragedy into your own words. The freedom to express yourself differently, innovatively, before that which threatens to chain and bind one to arbitrariness and its limited, fossilizing definitions. — David Grossman

I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though
not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint. — Doris Lessing

What's wrong with the world," Nana explained, "is that people stopped listening to their hearts ...
"Not everybody stopped listening," she continued, "but enough people did to make a difference. We've go so much in this life that all we know how to do is want more. So we concentrate on the wrong things
things we can see
as being the measure of a person. We think if we can win something big or buy something snazzy it'll make us more than we are. Our hearts know that's not true, but the eyes are powerful. It's easier to fix on what we can see than listen to the still, small voice of a whispering heart."
Nana turned her eyes on me like a vet looking for fleas: "A heart will say amazing things if it's given half a chance. — Joan Bauer

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in
the most prosperous countries, and the quality
of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what
is being discovered about the infinitely large
and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this
end of the century and millennium. What a very
few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical
world will perhaps cause this period not to be
judged as a pure return of barbarism. — Primo Levi

Let's say you and a small child go to a magic show, where things are made to float in the air. Which of you would have the most fun?"
"I probably would."
"And why would that be?"
"Because I would know how impossible it all is."
"So ... for the child it's no fun to see the laws of nature being defied before it has learned what they are."
"I guess that's right."
"And we are still at the crux of Hume's philosophy of experience. He would have added that the child has not yet become a slave of the expectations of habit; he is thus the more open-minded of you two. I wonder if the child is not also the greater philosopher? He comes utterly without preconceived opinions. And that, my dear Sophie, is the philosopher's most distinguishing virtue. The child perceives the world as it is, without putting more into things than he experiences — Jostein Gaarder

The idea of photography as evidence is pure bullshit. A photo is no more proof of any reality than what you may hear being said by someone in a bus. We only record details, small fragments of the world. — Marc Riboud

A witch couldn't help being some kind of expert as to the ways people came into the world; by the time she was twelve, the older witches had trusted her to go out to a birth by herself. Besides, she had helped lambs to be born, even when she was quite small. It came naturally, as Nanny Ogg said, although not as naturally as you might think. She remembered Mr. and Mrs. Hamper, quite a decent couple who had three children in a row before they worked out what was causing it. — Terry Pratchett

Many of my daily preoccupations suggest that I belong more to the world than to God. A little criticism makes me angry, and a little rejection makes me depressed. A little praise raises my spirits, and a little success excites me. It takes very little to raise me up or thrust me down. Often I am like a small boat on the ocean, completely at the mercy of its waves. All the time and energy I spend in keeping some kind of balance and preventing myself from being tipped over and drowning shows that my life is mostly a struggle for survival: not a holy struggle, but an anxious struggle resulting from the mistaken idea that it is the world that defines me. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

In school we learn that one of the best survival strategies is being part of a clique . With our friends, we create a little, tiny world with codes for conduct, morality, dress, communication, ethnicity and sexuality. We then learn to judge everyone else who is not part of our little world by the standards that are acceptable to us. This is called "divide and conquer," and happens to be exactly how male, white patriarchal society operates. When you choose not to see how you, yourself, perpetuate this social model, your world assuredly becomes-or remains-small, "safe," persnickety, judgmental and uninspiring. — Inga Muscio

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being. — Anne Carson

That was the problem with ones actions. They would always remain 'acted'. They always remained 'being done', and their influence on the world, whether small or big , would always be palpable. You couldn't refute the past. He would always remain liable for the consequences of his actions. Should anyone knock on his door and ask for reparation, he would give what was asked of him without question. There simply was no way of clearing the world of its history, and its history was simply a compilation of the existence of people and other organisms , and their actions. Of things which had been done. — Adelheid Manefeldt

All too often we say of a man doing a good job that he is indispensable. A flattering canard, as so many disillusioned and retired and fired have discovered when the world seems to keep on turning without them. In business, a man can come nearest to indispensability by being dispensable in his current job. How can a man move up to new responsibilities if he is the only one able to handle his present tasks? It matters not how small or large the job you now have, if you have trained no one to do it as well, you're not available; you've made your promotion difficult if not impossible. — Malcolm Forbes

I WAS NO CHILD NOW, neither in age nor in protectedness, and I was thrown for fair on the free spinning of the world. If you think, and some do, that continual intimacy, familiarity, and love can result in falsehood, this being thrown on the world may be a very desirable even if sad thing. What Christ meant when he called his mother "Woman." That after all she was like any woman. That in any true life you must go and be exposed outside the small circle that encompasses two or three heads in the same history of love. Try and stay, though, inside. See how long you can. — Saul Bellow

It was like being alive twice, seeing the world twice, and the new vision came through the eyes of a small, curious, unstoppable being who had never seen it before. We had our own little mindfulness coach, reminding us that when all else fails us in this life we can love our own toes, or the velvet coolness of a dog's ear, or his downy fur. People told us how we would fall in love with our baby, but not how through him we would fall in love with everything else again too. — Susanne Antonetta

I was not thinking about the world. I was not thinking about history. I was thinking about my body's small, precise, limited, hungry movement forward into the future that seemed at every instant on the verge of being shut down. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Okay. Let me rephrase. Sometimes being crazy is a demon. And sometimes the demon is me. And I visit quiet sidewalks and loud parties and dark movies, and a small demon looks out at the world with me. Sometimes it sleeps. Sometimes it plays. Sometimes it laughs with me. Sometimes it tries to kill me. But it's always with me. I suppose we're all possessed in some way. Some of us with dependence on pills or wine. Others through sex or gambling. Some of us through self-destruction or anger or fear. And some of us just carry around our tiny demon as he wreaks havoc in our mind, tearing open old dusty trunks of bad memories and leaving the remnants spread everywhere. — Jenny Lawson

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky's great novel The Brothers Karamazov, there is a scene in which two people are talking about suffering. Ivan Karamazov is talking about there being any possibility that we can make sense of suffering, and here's what he says: "I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened."11 — Timothy Keller

Many sentences popped out of Amos's mouth that Redelmeier knew he would forever remember: A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said. The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small. So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place. Redelmeier — Michael Lewis

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let's think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you've read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone's soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of
please forgive me
wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. — Anne Lamott

Newsflash she already has body image issues.
It's an intrinsic part of being a woman. Every woman in the world has some part of herself that she absolutely hates.
Her hands are too small, her feet are too big, her hair is too straight, too curly, her ears stick out, her bums too flat, her nose is too big and, you know, nothing you can say will change how we feel.
What men don't understand is, the right clothes, the right shoes, the right makeup it just ... It, it hides the flaws we think we have.
They make us look beautiful to ourselves.
That's what makes us look beautiful to others.
Used to be all she needed to feel beautiful was a pink tutu and a plastic tiara.
And we spend our whole lives trying to feel that way again. — Richard Castle

Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world. — Haruki Murakami

But he had seen so little of life and the world himself, that he could scarcely help being one-sided and narrow-minded; and as he would not avail himself of his father's wider knowledge, what remained but to make mistakes? So, priding himself on an inflexible firmness in matters of "principle," however small, he confounded together things indifferent and important; did even wise ones foolishly; and attempted others which were neither wise, nor worth a hundredth part of the offence they created. "We — Mrs. Alfred Gatty

While I told myself that each win was a small deposit on the ultimate ownership of the world welterweight crown, the enormous need in me to win touched a whole heap of other responses a fourteen years old can't really work out. It had something to do with rejecting the Lord, with my mother, the Judge, being surrounded by guys who came from wealthy homes, even my headless snake. While I didn't think of it as camouflage, I now know that it was, that I kept myself protected by being out in front. Too far in front to be an easy mark. — Bryce Courtenay

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.-Why then do you try to 'enlarge' your mind? Subtilize it. — Herman Melville

Modern physics is describing what the ancient wisdom keepers of the Americas have long known. These shamans, known as 'the Earthkeepers,' say that we're dreaming the world into being through the very act of witnessing it. Scientists believe that we're only able to do this in the very small subatomic world. Shamans understand that we also dream the larger world that we experience with our senses. — Alberto Villoldo

The author describes the critic within us as adults as the selves who live too much in their heads rather than their bodies, who are burdened with too much knowledge about how the world works rather than excited about how it could work or should, who are afraid of being judged and not being loved. Most adults do not live in a world of forgiveness and unconditional love, unless, that is, they have small children. — Jennifer Senior

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either
but right through every human heart
and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I think we're put out into the world to forge relationships with people. Those can be as small as buying coffee from someone or as large as a marriage. The important thing is that we try to make connections or have experiences with other humans. Otherwise what's the point of being on this earth? — Laurel Nakadate

Ocean acidification looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by the environmental pressure groups in case the climate fails to warm: another try at condemning fossil fuels. [ ... ] Even if the world warms as much as the consensus expects, the net harm still looks small alongside the real harm now being done by preventable causes; and if it does warm this much, it will be because more people are rich enough to afford to do something about it. — Matt Ridley

It was a bright day for me when I realised there wasn't any one way to live as myself. You're not a character. You have as many sides and reflections as the ripples that pass through a river in the spring. Don't trick yourself into thinking you must be one person. Because you will never be only one person. Not even in the span of a day are you only one person. We are worlds stitched inside skin. There's nothing small or simple about a world. There's nothing small or simple about any living being. Remember this the next time someone tells you who to be and how to live. They haven't figured it out yet. But don't let yourself forget. — F.K. Preston

All right," said Ford. "How would you react if I said that I'm not from Guildford at all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse?"
Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way.
"I don't know," he said, taking a pull of beer. "Why, do you think it's the sort of thing you're likely to say?"
Ford gave up. It really wasn't worth bothering at the moment, what with the world being about to end. — Douglas Adams

She was bedridden falling a fall which broke her hip. X-rays showed that she had cancer of the colon which had already spreed. To my surprise I found her cheerful and free of pain, perhaps because of the small doses of morphine she was being given. She was surrounded by neighbours and friends who congregated at her bedside day and night. In this cosy, noisy, gregarious world of the "all-chinese" sickbed, so different from the stark, sterile solitude of the American hospital room, her life had assumed the astounding quality of a continuous farewell party. — Adeline Yen Mah

To whoever will listen.

I've been thinking about black holes a lot. How their gravity is so strong it bends time and space. How you'd be stretched down to atoms passing the event horizon.

I kind of feel like I'm being stretched to atoms. Like I'm falling apart and becoming so metaphorically thin that I'm transparent. But, as nothing that happens past the event horizon affects the universe outside of it, nothing that I'm feeling is affecting anyone in the outside world, either.

The event horizon is a point of no return. Nothing, not even light, can escape it.

I wonder what will happen when I pass the event horizon and fully submerge myself into the black hole.

There are theories that if you enter a blackhole under a specific angle, you'll survive and hit the bottom of it. The chances are incredibily small.

I doubt I'll survive. — Emily Trunko

Public and private organizations all over the world have studied the mechanics of sexism within science and have concluded that they are complex and multifactorial. In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can't possibly be what you are. — Hope Jahren

People go on about places like Starbucks being unpersonal and all that, but what if that's what you want? I'd be lost if people like that got their way and there was nothing unpersonal in the world. I like to know that there are big places without windows where no one gives a shit. You need confidence to go into small places with regular customers ... I'm happiest in the Virgin Megastore and Borders and Starbucks and Pizza Express, where no one gives a shit and no one knows who you are. My mum & dad are always going on about how soulless those places are, and I'm like Der. That's the point. — Nick Hornby

With the birth of Akash, in his sudden, perfect presence, Ruma had felt awe for the first time in her life. He still had the power to stagger her at times
simply the fact that he was breathing, that all his organs were in their proper places, that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small, sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood, her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born. Only the words her mother used were more literal, enriching the tired phrase with meaning: "He is made from your meat and bone." It had caused Ruma to acknowledge the supernatural in everyday life. But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible. — Jhumpa Lahiri

What a vindication of the belief that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, what a reminder of what Bobby Kennedy once said, about how small actions can be like pebbles being thrown into a still lake, and ripples of hope cascade outwards and change the world. — Barack Obama

So it seems as though this part of us that is living a life on Earth is only a small piece or splinter of a much larger us. That we are many rather than one, or rather pieces of a more complex whole. We are only able to focus on the splinter we perceive as our totality. That is a good thing, because if we were aware of the complexity of it we would not be able to function in this world or reality. We are only able to see the facade that masks a much larger picture. Only now are we being allowed to peek behind the veil. — Dolores Cannon

Parents have such formidable power. They can protect you from all the pain in the world. Or inflict the hardest pain of all. And as children we accept what we get. Perhaps we believe that anything is better than that which we all fear the most. Loneliness. Abandonment. But once you accept that fact that you have always been alone, and will always be, then your perspective can being to change. You can become aware of the small kindnesses, the little comforts. Be grateful for them. And with time you will understand that there is nothing to fear. And much to be grateful for. For me, the realization took a lifetime. Don't let it take you that long, Veronika. (189) — Linda Olsson

A small town is automatically a world of pretense. Since everyone knows everyone else's business, it becomes the job of the populace to act as if they don't know what is going on instead of its being their job to try to find out. — Jeanine Basinger

In his lifetime, that small fishing village had turned into the seventh largest port in the world, an eight-million-strong city; women had gotten the right to divorce, of which his wife took full advantage; and his son's living standard was so much higher than his, his so much higher than his own parents, that he couldn't understand the boy's constant desire for more, more, more. Despite a total lack of education from the state, Lao Song, unlike some of his classmates, was not entirely stunted; instead, he sought out the rebellious track of "growing his own mind," as he called it, teaching himself whatever he could through rudimentary means. Despite being in China's "Lost Generation," Song had somehow found himself. — Megan Rich

So much of what folks want in the world turns out to be just a thing they say. Words change the way you feel for a small time and that just about goes as far as it can go toward being a true thing. — Robert Bausch

Whether it is under the guise of survival and self-defence or directly expressed through dominion and greed, the failure to recognize the common humanity shared by us all lies at the heart of our difficulties. To overcome it, we should begin to develop, from the level of the individual through that of society to the world at large, what I call a sense of universal responsibility; a deep respect for every living being who lives on this one small planet and calls it home. — Dalai Lama

It was a short session of the simple being-ness that he had long coveted for The Afterlife. What Glynis had called "doing nothing," The smelling and seeing and hearing and small noticings of sheer animal presence in the world surely constituted activity of a sort, perhaps the most important kind. This was a form of companionship that he'd been especially cherishing with Glynis of late: devoid of conversation, but so surprising in its contrast to being by yourself. — Lionel Shriver

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

In true budo there is no enemy or opponent. True budo is to become one with the universe, not train to become powerful or to throw down some opponent. Rather we train in hopes of being of some use, however small our role may be, in the task of bringing peace to mankind around the world. — Morihei Ueshiba

We resonate with one another's sorrows because we are interconnected. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

A human being is not mindless or mentally deficient without language, but he is severely restricted in the range of his thoughts, confined, in effect, to an immediate, small world. — Oliver Sacks

Football, that's just athletics. But in the business world - doing everything - people are competing. So you need good work ethics, and I think it helped me to develop good work ethics, being in a small town. — Herschel Walker

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

He was regarded merely as an eccentric employee of indifferent merit, and his post of deputy chief clerk was the highest he would ever reach. Well aware of this, he made it a rule never to show any zeal, except in special circumstances. It is true that in these cases his zeal was clothed with a spirit of vengeance directed against the whole human race - this being his second favourite occupation. Petitbidois would have liked to hold the reins of power. This being beyond his sphere, he utilized the small driblets of authority which came his way for the purpose of casting ridicule upon established law and order, by making it act as a sort of unintelligent and, if possible, malicious Providence. 'The world is an idiot place anyway,' he would say, 'so why worry? Life is just a lottery. Let us leave the decision to chance. — Gabriel Chevallier

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

In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny. — Thomas Friedman

The greatest security we can have in this world that we are in the grace of God, does not consist in the feelings that we have of love to Him, but rather in an irrevocable abandonment of our whole being into His hands, and in a firm resolution never to consent to any sin great or small. — Francis Of Assisi

We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to the end and obliged to begin again, victims and yet also the willing servants of unknown mysterious powers, we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security, a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always new in every fibre. Every hour of our years was linked to the fate of the world. In sorrow and in joy we have lived through time and history far beyond our own small lives, while they knew nothing beyond themselves. Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full. — Stefan Zweig

It's all a matter of paying attention, being awake in the present moment, and not expecting a huge payoff. The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses. — Charles De Lint

I never dreamed of being Shakespeare or Goethe, and I never expected to hold the great mirror of truth up before the world; I dreamed only of being a little pocket mirror, the sort that a woman can carry in her purse; one that reflects small blemishes, and some great beauties, when held close enough to the heart. — Peter Altenberg

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being. — Madeleine L'Engle

For me, the idea of living small has always involved being curious - taking a look at how my day-to-day is connected to the larger world around me, and to the delicate universe that sits between my ears and in my small body. — Dee Williams

Every time I rap about being a big girl in a small world, it's doing a couple things: it's empowering my self-awareness, my body image, and it's also making the statement that we are all bigger than this; we're a part of something bigger than this, and we should live in each moment knowing that. — Lizzo

My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade away for my eyes restores me as a complete image for the unreal eye to which I deny all images. A complete image with reference to a world devoid of image which imagines me in the absence of any imaginable figure. The being of a nonbeing of which I am the infinitely small negation which it instigates as its profound harmony. In the night shall I become the universe? — Maurice Blanchot

People play small for lots of reasons, but at the core of them all is fear. Playing small means playing safe - avoiding risk, failure, criticism, and the list goes on. But just imagine how incredibly different the world would be if everyone committed to playing big - taking on audacious goals, trying to make a meaningful difference, being all they could possibly be. — Margie Warrell

Sweden is a small country and, well, our family's pretty prominent in that world, I guess. And I really didn't like the sound of just being 'the fourth acting Skarsgard.' — Bill Skarsgard

Perhaps swimming was dancing under the water, he thought. To swim under lily pads seeing their green slender stalks wavering as you passed, to swim under upraised logs past schools of sunfish and bluegills, to swim through reed beds past wriggling water snakes and miniature turtles, to swim in small lakes, big lakes, Lake Michigan, to swim in small farm ponds, creeks, rivers, giant rivers where one was swept along easefully by the current, to swim naked alone at night when you were nineteen and so alone you felt like you were choking every waking moment, having left home for reasons more hormonal than rational; reasons having to do with the abstraction of the future and one's questionable place in the world of the future, an absurdity not the less harsh for being so widespread. — Jim Harrison

The problem with small pressure vessels is CO2 toxicity. You can have all the oxygen in the world, but once the CO2 gets above 1 percent, you'll start to get drowsy. At 2 percent, it's like being drunk. At 5 percent, it's hard to stay conscious. Eight percent will eventually kill you. Staying alive isn't about oxygen, it's about getting rid of CO2. — Andy Weir

Thank you, Ocean," I said to the sea. "Thank you for rolling relentlessly around the world and showing us how everything's connected. Thank you, Stars," I said looking up. "For shining down from such a distance. You show us how small we are and yet how magnificent it is to be alive. Thank you, Earth, for holding everything all together and giving us a place to walk, and sleep, and love." I squeezed Josh's hand. "And thank you, Josh, for being earth and water and stardust and for coming to me in the uniqueness of yourself. — Catou Martine

Provides American business with the only reliable domestic market in the world.
Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about. — John Taylor Gatto

It is the prospect of being close to you that makes marriage partly attractive. I can imagine the equality which we would then enjoy, it would mean more to you than any other type of equality, and be more beautiful. I could be a son who was freer, more thankful, less guilty, and more upright; you could be a father who was less troubled, less tyrannical, more sympathetic, and more content. But to reach this point all that has happened would need to be undone; so we would need to be abolished. But we are as we are, and marriage is your domain and so it is forbidden to me. At times I imagine the map of the world laid out and you stretched across it. And all that is left for my life are the areas you don't cover or can't reach. And because I see you as a giant, my territory is miserable and small and doesn't include marriage. I — Franz Kafka

I was the only person in an infinite exploding universe who knew that this powder was made of opal. In a wide, wide world, full of unimaginable numbers of people, I was - in addition to being small and insufficient - special. I was not only a quirky bundle of genes, but I was also unique existentially, because of the tiny detail that I knew about Creation, because of what I had seen and then understood. Until I phoned someone, the concrete knowledge that opal was the mineral that fortified each seed on each hackberry tree was mine alone. Whether or not this was something worth knowing seemed another problem for another day. I stood and absorbed this revelation as my life turned a page, and my first scientific discovery shone, as even the cheapest plastic toy does when it is new. I — Hope Jahren

She had never in her life met such an innocent. In nearly everyone who had ever lived there was at least one small splinter of evil. There was none in him: she knew it when she saw him up on that windowsill the night before, the lightning shocking the world behind him. His eagerness, his deep kindness, these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right. She — Lauren Groff

Sometimes being crazy is a demon. And sometimes the demon is me. And I visit quiet sidewalks and loud parties and dark movies, and a small demon looks out at the world with me. Sometimes it sleeps. Sometimes it plays. Sometimes it laughs with me. Sometimes it tries to kill me. But it's always with me. I suppose we're all possessed in some way. Some of us with dependence on pills or wine. Others through sex or gambling. Some of us through self-destruction or anger or fear. And some of us just carry around our tiny demon as he wreaks havoc in our mind, tearing open old dusty trunks of bad memories and leaving the remnants spread everywhere. Wearing the skins of people we've hurt. Wearing the skins of people we've loved. And sometimes, when it's worst, wearing our skins. — Jenny Lawson

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