Quotes on World

The world does not need tourists who ride by in a bus clucking their tongues. The world as it is needs those who will love it enough to change it, with what they have, where they are.

When we look around the world today, when we see in Afghanistan that 10 million people have registered to vote in their upcoming elections, including 40 percent of those people are women, that's just unbelievable.

And no matter what, there's not one thing in this world *or* the next that we can do or hope or guess at or wish or pray that can change it or help it one iota. Because whatever is, is. That's all. And all there is now is to be ready for it, strong enough for it, whatever it may be. That's all. That's all that matters. It's all that matters because it's all that's possible.

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare in the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

We are born of light. The seasons are felt through light. We only know the world as it is evoked by light.

The goal of my work is to help assure that we can create a world of abundance in which we meet the basic needs of every man, woman and child.

The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.

Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.

And there is a lot of idiosyncrasy. But there are also regularities and phenomena. And what the data is going to be able to do - if there's enough of it - is uncover, in the mess and the noise of the world, some lines of music that actually have harmony. It's there, somewhere.

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.

I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.

Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.

When I look around the world, I don't see too many damsels in distress. If they're a damsel in distress, they're manipulating some guy to help them.

To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.

It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.

I am not tired of my work, neither am I tired of the world; yet, when Christ calls me home, I shall go with gladness.