questions Quotes

“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.”

“A guy on a ranch don’t never listen nor he don’t ast no questions.”

“You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others...”

“Say! In the dark? Here in the dark! Would you, could you, in the dark?” “I would not, could not, in the dark.”

“Would you, could you, on a boat?”

“Would you eat them in a box? Would you eat them with a fox?”

“Would you like them in a house? Would you like them with a mouse?”

“Do you like green eggs and ham?”

“Would you? Could you? In a car? Eat them! Eat them! Here they are.”

“The past and the present are within my field of inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.”

“‘Mary Poppins,’ he cried, ‘you’ll never leave us, will you?‘”

“If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.”

“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.”

“But why do only unimportant things?”

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

“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.”

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

“She always kept up the questioning until she received a satisfactory answer.”

“Can one come 2 conclusions, Before the question is conceived?”

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 was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.

“He ought to question them upon everything, and listen to their opinions, and afterwards form his own conclusions.”

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

“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.”

“Would you like them here or there?”

“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?”

“Do you ever wonder why things have to turn out the way they do?”

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.

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

“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.”

“HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error?

“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 you get your, ‘Who am I?‘, question right, all of your, ‘What should I do?’ questions tend to take care of themselves”

“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.”

“All the running, the hiding, the lies, the killing, for what? The endless circle of revenge: answering pain by inflicting pain. Why did I do it?”

“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.”

“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?”

“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.”

“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.”

“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?”

“Even if we did survive and Mr. Tanaka adopted us, would my own family cease to exist?”

“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.”

“But the memory changes you, right? It makes you a different person.”

″...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.”

“What are you in the mood for?”

“You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it?”

“Faith does not eliminate questions. But faith knows where to take them.”

“The king, who was the wisest man in the kingdom, knew well there was a time when things must be done and questions left till afterwards.”

“Faith does not eliminate questions. But faith knows where to take them.”

“Do You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?”″

“You can be a fool for five minutes if you ask a question. However, you are a fool for a lifetime if you hesitate to ask a question.”

“He turned away from the bar as if he could leave the question there. But questions had no location; they could follow him around.”

“As soon as ay man says of the affairs of he State “What does it matter to me?” the State may be given up for lost.”

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

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.”

“Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?”

“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…‘”

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

“Answerless questions can destroy you. Move on.”

“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.”

“Is it better to go with the flow or let the flow go?”

“Maybe we should always start everything from the inside and work to the outside, and not from the outside to the inside. What’d you think?”

“Why would anyone want to kill the Black?”

“Maybe we should always start everything from the inside and work to the outside, and not from the outside to the inside. What d’you think?”

“It is better to go with the flow or let the flow go?”

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.

Chosen to care, he makes his way through town helping and hurting (when necessary) until only one question remains: Who’s behind Ed’s mission?

″ ‘What if the moon melts, and the world goes dark?’ he asked.”

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...

“If this is the stone age and mum says the ice age is coming any minute now...how long is an age?”

“Time...why is it time? What is time, dad?”

“The old monk winced in surprise and narrowed his eyes as he looked around at the manuscripts piled on the shelves around him.”

“I don’t like living in caves. Do neanderthal people wear stone trousers?”

“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?”

″ I haven’t seen him. I haven’t seen any rabbits anywhere. I would not eat a rabbit. Don’t ask me anymore questions.”

″‘What do you think success is?’ asked the boy. ‘To love,’ said the mole.”

“There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”

“What’s the point of God giving me life if I can’t live it as my own?”

“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.’ “

“Do you want to hide all your life, or do you want to change history?”

“But answer me this: how can a story end happily if there is no love?”

“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.”

“Do trees exist?”

″‘What was you doing in that box, baby?’ he says. But the baby only keeps on crying.”

“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.”

“It is my belief that the House itself loves and blesses equally everything that it has created. Should I try to do the same?”

“I’m sorry. There. That’s it. I’ve said it. Now can I go?”

“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.”

″‘Any questions?’ (Please, sir, when am I scheduled to pick my nose?)”

“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.”

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”

“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.”

“Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?”

″‘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.”

″‘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.‘”

“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?”

“Jerry, if a baby giant panda were very large would he be a giant baby giant panda?”

“Aunt Tissie, I opened a door and saw some ladies sitting in a room. Who were they?”

″‘What is this?’ said the Leopard, ‘that is so ‘sclusively dark, and yet so full of little pieces of light.‘”

“I keep six honest serving-men; (They taught me all I knew) Their names are What and Where and When And How and Why and Who.”

“You can’t do half the things yourself that children in books do, making models or so on. I wonder why?”

“I wonder if he is using the same wind we are using.”

“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?”

“Just why are you here?”

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?”

So he tortured himself, fretting himself with such questions, and finding a kind of enjoyment in it.