“If he is old enough to ask the question he is old enough to receive true answers. I am not putting the thoughts into his head, but helping him unfold those already there. These children are wiser than we are...”
“We don’t want to betray anyone - we don’t want to be the first to get curious and ask questions or challenge the stories. We ask ourselves, How can I love and protect my family if I’m rumbling with these hard truths? For me, the answer to that question is another question: How can I love and protect my family if I’m not rumbling with these hard truths?”
“I’ve asked myself again and again whether it wouldn’t have been better if we hadn’t gone into hiding; if we were dead now and didn’t have to go through this misery, especially so that the others could be spared the burden. But we all shrink from this thought. We still love life, we haven’t yet forgotten the voice of nature, and we keep hoping, hoping for...everything.”
“His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: “Do you lie?”
But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.”
“Aunt Lydia said it was best not to speak unless they asked you a direct question. Try to think of it from their point of view she said, her hands clasped and wrung together, her nervous pleading smile. It isn’t easy for them.”
“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.”
“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”
“If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.”
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.
“There you are,” Cardan says as I take my place beside him. “How has the night been going for you? Mine has been full of dull conversation about how my head is going to find itself on a spike.”
“I find it very difficult to let a friend or beloved go into that country of no return. I answer the heroic question, “Death, where is thy sting?” with “It is here in my heart, and my mind, and my memories.”
“Many of us have made our world so familiar that we do not see it anymore. An interesting question to ask yourself at night is, What did I really see this day?”
“I still don’t understand what happened there. Why he [Finnick] essentially abandoned her [Mags] to carry Peeta. Why she not only didn’t question it, but ran straight to her death without a moment’s hesitation. Was it because she was so old that her days were numbered, anyway?”
“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.”
“Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles. We’ve all worked with that person. That person is a drag.”
“When the student is ready the teacher appears. When the question is asked then the answer is heard. When we are truly ready to receive then what we need will become available.”
“When my mother did not return, I imagined all sorts of things. Maybe she had cancer and didn’t want to tell us and was hiding in Idaho. Maybe she got knocked on the head and had amnesia and was wandering around Lewiston, not knowing who she really was, or thinking she was someone else.”
“How will I teach this mind what it is to have a soul? How will I teach this mind to understand pain? How will I teach it to want to take on another person’s suffering?”
“It’s like somebody gave me a puzzle, but I don’t have the box with the picture on it. So I don’t know what the final thing is supposed to look like. I’m not even sure if I have all the pieces . . . Even though I usually know the answer to most of the questions at school, lots of stuff still puzzles me.”
“Breakfast was a curious meal. Everyone was very polite…. Six people, all outwardly self-possessed and normal. And within? Thoughts that ran round in a circle like squirrels in a cage…. “What next? What next? Who? Which?”
“Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path.”
“When Sean Tuohy first spotted Michael Oher sitting in the stands in the Briarcrest gym, staring at basketball practice, he saw a boy with nowhere to go but up. The question was how to take him there.”
“The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures fools? . . . You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything.”
“It’s folly to measure your success in money or fame. Success is measured only by your ability to say yes to these two questions: Did I do the work I needed to do? Did I give it everything I had?”
“What if I forgave myself? What if I forgave myself even though I’d done some things I shouldn’t have? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything different from what I’d done? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if all those things I shouldn’t have done were what got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”
“And yet what precisely is this ‘greatness’? Just where, or in what, does it lie? . . . I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart.”
“He suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his loneliness pondered always on the same insoluble question: ‘What is this? Can it be that it is Death?’ And the inner voice answered: ‘Yes, it is Death.‘”
“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no fear because there was no death.
In place of death there was light.”
“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.”
″‘What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn’t live until it is imagined in someone’s mind.’
‘What does the story mean, then?’
‘It means what you want it to mean,’ Hoid said. ‘The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.‘”
“Although Mr. Summers and everyone else in the village knew the answer perfectly well, it was the business of the official of the lottery to ask such questions formally.”
“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.”
“Nancy, WILL you tell me what this absurd ‘game’ is that the whole town seems to be babbling about? And what, please, has my niece to do with it? WHY does everybody, from Milly Snow to Mrs. Tom Payson, send word to her that they’re ‘playing it’? As near as I can judge, half the town are putting on blue ribbons, or stopping family quarrels, or learning to like something they never liked before, and all because of Pollyanna.”
″...tired of making circles inside a fishbowl, watching life through cloudy glass. Would I ever be Sophie la Fuerte, the strong one, a salmon swimming up waterfalls, leaping over dams?”
“There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.”
“What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.”
The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’ the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question ‘Where shall we have lunch?‘”
“While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought..”
“And you ask things about me, and I tell you about myself. I do not know why I tell you so much truth, but you are beautiful and I am tired—though I am attached, too, to my alone-ness.”
“My voice trembled as I spoke, as it did whenever I was angry. ‘I feel let down sometimes. The people in books—the heroes—they’re always so… heroic. And I try to be, but…‘”
“You would be much better off in reading this book if you asked yourself who you are, rather than asked who I am, for you cannot understand what I am unless you understand the nature of personality and the characteristics of consciousness.”
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.
Fairies are DANGEROUS. And they don’t want you to know about them. I love that this book takes the question of fairies and brownies and pixies seriously, it gives this story its power. I love the setting: the rambling old house out in the country, the secret room, the shadowy feeling that something is watching...
“We live in a disconcerting world. Trying to comprehend what we see around us, we ask ourselves: what is the universe made of? and what is our place in it? where odes the universe come from? and where do we come from?”
“Her father didn’t have time to take her to see one at the zoo. He didn’t have time for anything. He went to work every day before Hannah went to school, and in the evening he worked at home. When Hannah asked him a question, he would say, ‘Not now, I’m busy, maybe tomorrow.’ “
“The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.”
“Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water?”
‘Sid’ll be back,’ said Bill Sparrow. ‘We might as well have tea.’ ‘No,’ said her mother. ‘Where’s Peggy?’ asked Amy. ‘She is upstairs. She doesn’t want any tea. And don’t ask any more questions.’ As his wife stood making the tea, Bill Sparrow massaged her shoulder. He did this when she complained of back-ache.”
“There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person’s value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn’t?”
“What would have happened if she had never lost those jewels? Who knows? Who knows? How strange life is, how fickle! How little is needed to ruin or to save!”
“What secret rule could be keeping Nonna and Mamma, mother and daughter, from seeing each other? What was it that I didn’t know? Whenever I got back home, Mamma would interrogate me about Nonna Eia’s health. She bombarded me with questions, sometimes embarrassing ones. Like, ‘Did she have a strange smell? Are you sure she’s keeping clean?”
“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.”
“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.”
“In that moment of “raw reality,” as Mark Allen has called it, when something inside you asks, How bad do you want it?, an inner curtain is drawn open, revealing a part of you that is not seen except in moments of crisis. And when your answer is to keep pushing, you come away from the trial with the kind of self-knowledge and self-respect that can’t be bought.”
″‘What happens when they buy you?’ he asked her.
‘That, of course, is outside of my experience,’ said the elephant, ‘but I should think that one simply goes out into the world and does whatever one does. One dances or balances a ball, as the case may be.‘”
“Such frank talk about money embarrassed Kit. Her grandfather had seldom mentioned such a thing. She herself had rarely so much as held a coin in her hand, and for sixteen years she had never questioned the costly and beautiful things that surrounded her. In the last few months, to be sure, she had a terrifying glimpse of what it might mean to live without money, but it seemed shameful to speak of it.”
“The stillness had become an expectant one; the house seemed to hold is breath; the darkness pressed up to him, pressing him with a question: Come on, Tom, the clock has struck thirteen- what are you going to do about it?”
“I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad; as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other.”
“She often remembered that building and wondered who owned it. Someone very kind she was sure for in front of every one of the many seats there had been a little carpet-eared puppy-sized dog-bed.”
“They’re a family. They’re a family. And this isn’t Ben’s apartment: not really. Right now I’m sitting here inside someone’s family home. Why on earth didn’t Ben tell me this? Did it not seem important? Did he somehow not know?”
The Old Grey Donkey, Eeyore, stood by himself in a thistly corner of the forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “Inasmuch as which?“—and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.
His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts. The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions.
“Who is it?” said Antony.
“Robert Ablett.”
“Oh!” said Antony. “I thought his name was Mark,” he added, more to himself than to the other.
“Yes, Mark Ablett lives here. Robert is his brother.” He shuddered, and said, “I was afraid it was Mark.”
“Was Mark in the room too?”
“Yes,” said Cayley absently. Then, as if resenting suddenly these questions from a stranger, “Who are you?”