Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inc...
When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imaginati...
Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, "materialism" would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a particular and limited way of l...
'Maybe you out to go back there.' 'Can't. Gotta stay where... where I know what's what.' 'I Reckon that's what most of us think. But there's more strangers where you're from than in some sandland halfway around the world. And more strangers in your h...
So there were two worlds: the perceived world, a dimension of adjectives, equations and brush strokes, a surface dazzling with our efforts to render it, but ultimately bearing only our own reflections; and the impenetrable world, the plumbless dark f...
The Men of the Ordeal do not march to save the World, Proyas--at least not first and foremost. They march to save their wives and children. Their tribes and their nations. If they learn that the world, their world, slips into ruin behind them, that t...
Forget it all, I told myself, escape into your mind and your work, into the place where you are only your living, breathing self, not a citizen of any state, not a stake in that infernal game, the place where only what reason you have can still work ...
There is the potential for a particle of matter to be located where we expect it to be or to be located anywhere in the physical world. So it is with our lives – our very next moment can occur along the most probable path or it can occur on a path ...
I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely...
We want clean air, clean water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world. Yet we aren't willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions.
If we went by the world's definition of who I'm supposed to be because I look weird... 'Well, surely, this guy can't have a productive life, surely, he doesn't have a sense of humor. Surely, he can't love life.' We stereotype people in this world. An...
They say that to escape reality is when you sleep, but when you sleep your sub conscious is in control of your dreams. For me to escape reality is when I read and write. When I read the world around me doesn't exist. The world in the story does and w...
The world has enough women who know how to be smart. It needs women who are willing to be simple. The world has enough women who know how to be brilliant. It needs some who will be brave. The world has enough women who are popular. It needs more who ...
Contemplating a flame perpetuates a primordial reverie. It separates us from the world and enlarges our world as dreamers. In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away. The flame is there, fe...
As a woman, I see myself as a garden, and I see myself as the gardener of myself, I see myself forming and pruning and watering and nourishing all the flowers and trees and vines and leaves in me. There is a world within yourself, that has so much to...
You are good. But it is not enough just to be good. You must be good for something. You must contribute good to the world. The world must be a better place for your presence. And the good that is in you must be spread to others… In this world so fi...
Jesus: You're here to trick me. The Cobra/Satan: Trick you? To love and care for a woman, to have a family? This is a trick? Why are you trying to save the world? Aren't your own sins enough for you? What arrogance to think you can save the world. Th...
Leonard Shelby: I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. Do I believe the world's s...
Wendy: Why won't you let him run? Warren: Hey he's too old and his bike's too old. Ali: Well I hear he's come halfway around the world to ride that cycle. Wendy: Yeah, c'mon. Warren: Wendy, if he was to kill himself. Wendy: So! It's his life.
I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between ...
When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought...
