answers Quotes

“He came in to demand an answer and I told him the truth. That I have fought with myself over that night, one half of me swearing blind that I tied a simple slipknot, the other half convinced that I tied the Langford double. I can never know for sure.”

Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers.

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

“The lion and the giraffe and the wombat and the rest do what they do and are what they are. And somehow manage to make it there in the cage, living the unexamined life. But to be human is to know and care and ask. To keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence hollering, ‘What’s it for?’ at the stones and stars, and making prisons and palaces out of the echoing answers. That’s what we do and that’s what we are. And that’s why a zoo is a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.”

“Father laughed, which upset Bruno even more; there was nothing that made him more angry than when a grown-up laughed at him for not knowing something, especially when he was trying to find out the answer by asking questions.”

“What God gives in answer to our prayers will always be the thing we most urgently need, and it will always be sufficient.”

“He gave me the only answer he could—that history proved time and again it was difficult to change what people believed as truth.”

“But now, as an examining magistrate, Ivan Ilych felt that everyone without exception, even the most important and self-satisfied, was in his power, and that he need only write a few words on a sheet of paper with a certain heading, and this or that important, self- satisfied person would be brought before him in the role of an accused person or a witness, and if he did not choose to allow him to sit down, would have to stand before him and answer his questions.”

“I am not bound to please thee with my answers.”

“We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. ”

“Why don’t people ask us about our hope? The answer is probably that we look as if we hope in the same things they do. Our lives don’t look like they are on the Calvary road, stripped down for sacrificial love, serving others with the sweet assurance that we don’t need to be rewarded in this life.”

“The answer, The answer, my friend, is not yours to invent or create. It will be decided for you. It is outside you. It is real and objective and firm. One day you will hear it. You don’t create it. You don’t define it. It comes to you, and sooner or later you conform to it—or bow to it.”

“It’s better to know some of the questions, than all of the answers.”

“It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.”

“You are not alone. No one who calls on Him can call in vain. Whatever troubles you, be certain that He has the answer, and will gladly give it to you, if you simply turn to Him and ask it of Him.”

“He will not withhold all answers that you need for anything that seems to trouble you. He knows the way to solve all problems, and resolve all doubts. His certainty is yours. You need but ask it of Him, and it will be given you.”

“When someone refuses to tell me a certain piece of information, it only makes me that much more determined to find out the truth. I hate being ignorant. For me, a question unanswered is like a thorn in my side that pains me every time I move until I can pluck it out.”

He explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.

“You’ll know her more by your questions than by her answers.”

“Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

“Those are good questions, Ivy, but for some questions there are no good answers.”

″ A man that can’t answer your questions when you ask, without getting defensive, is often a man who is keeping more than just the answer from you.”

“Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.”

“There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.”

“There would be a lot fewer of us screwing up the game of life so brilliantly, if there was always a right answer instead of just a best--or even a less bad--answer.”

“He shifted in his seat and smiled secretly. The pleasure of self-discovery.”

“All answers lie beyond the gate of experience.”

Where have they gone and will they be coming home again? When Griffin starts school and meets Princess Layla the answers to his questions gently start to unfold.

“I believe the best way to get an answer to prayer is to work for it.”

“How has Mrs. Olinski chosen her sixth-grade Academic Bowl team? She had a number of answers. But were any of them true? How had she really chosen Noah and Nadia and Ethan and Julian? And why did they make such a good team? Mrs. Eva Marie Olinski always gave good answers. Whenever she was asked how she had selected her team for the Academic Bowl, she chose one of several good answers.”

″ ‘I gather colors,’ answered Frederick simply. ‘For winter is gray.’ ”

“To the stars who listen- and the dreams that are answered.”

“Mr. Jeavons said that I liked maths because it was safe. He said I liked maths because it meant solving problems, and these problems were difficult and interesting but there was always a straightforward answer at the end. And what he meant was that maths wasn’t like life because in life there are no straightforward answers at the end.”

“Death can come so fast. One day you have your grandpa. The next day you may not able to see him anymore. Then you feel really empty and sad. You must be wondering where you go when you die. Nobody knows for sure, only those who are already dead.”

″‘In some cases,’ he said, ‘we learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.‘”

“It means the right to have our own opinions. Human problems aren’t like mathematics, Nat. Every problem doesn’t have just one answer; sometimes you get several answers—and you don’t know which is the right one.”

“I won’t eat, I won’t answer anyone. I’ll just stay here.”

“No one wants to hear the real answers. What the Sorry for Your Loss Crowd wants is to feel good about asking the questions.”

“It is not enough to cry out, not sufficient to lay bare your woes and catalogue your needs; people have only to close their eyes and their ears, you cannot force them to see and to hear—or to answer your cries if they cannot and will not.”

“Everybody starts talking at once, asking her questions. Miss Saunders answers ‘em all. Some kids even go up to her face and stare and point. She lets them do it too, like she’s proud of her face or something.”

“She believed she would erect towers on the ridge marking the south and north points of the sun’s annual swing... Keeping track of such a thing would place a person, would be a way of saying, You are here, in this one station, now. It would be an answer to the question, Where am I?”