"We are an impossibility in an impossible universe."
— Ray Bradbury

"words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder."
— Jodi Picoult (Change of Heart)

"I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed."
— Jonathan Swift

"When King Lear dies in act five, do you know what Shakespeare has written? He has written, 'He dies.' No more. No fanfare, no metaphor, no brilliant final words. The culmination of the most influential piece of dramatic literature is, 'He dies.' Now I am not asking you to be happy at my leaving but all I ask you to do is to turn the page and let the next story begin.
-- Mr. Magorium"
— Suzanne Weyn (Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium)

"If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
"
— Rachel Carson (The Sense of Wonder)

"I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief."
— Gerry Spence (How to Argue & Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Everyday)

"If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile occupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength."
— Rachel Carson

""Now he saw another elephant emerge from the place where it had stood hidden in the trees. Very slowly it walked to the mutilated body and looked down. With its sinuous trunk it struck the huge corpse; then it reached up, broke some leafy branches with a snap, and draped them over the mass of torn thick flesh. Finally it tilted its massive head, raised its trunk, and roared into the empty landscape."
- Lois Lowry, The Giver, Ch. 13
"
— Lois Lowry

"The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder."
— Huston Smith (Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, Third and Updated Edition: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization)

"We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."
— G.K. Chesterton

"“Patience never wants Wonder to enter the house: because Wonder is a wretched guest. It uses all of you but is not careful with what is most fragile or irreplaceable. If it breaks you, it shrugs and moves on. Without asking, Wonder often brings along dubious friends: doubt, jealousy, greed. Together they take over; rearrange the furniture in every one of your rooms for their own comfort. They speak odd languages but make no attempt to translate for you. They cook strange meals in your heart that leave odd tastes and smells. When they finally go are you happy or miserable? Patience is always left holding the broom.”"
— Jonathan Carroll (White Apples)

""I never knew until that moment how bad it could hurt to lose something you never really had.""
— 'The Wonder Years'

"It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility. "
— Rachel Carson (The Sense of Wonder)

"A Second Childhood.”

When all my days are ending
And I have no song to sing,
I think that I shall not be too old
To stare at everything;
As I stared once at a nursery door
Or a tall tree and a swing.

Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs
On all my sins and me,
Because He does not take away
The terror from the tree
And stones still shine along the road
That are and cannot be.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for wine,
But I shall not grow too old to see
Unearthly daylight shine,
Changing my chamber’s dust to snow
Till I doubt if it be mine.

Behold, the crowning mercies melt,
The first surprises stay;
And in my dross is dropped a gift
For which I dare not pray:
That a man grow used to grief and joy
But not to night and day.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for lies;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Enormous night arise,
A cloud that is larger than the world
And a monster made of eyes.

Nor am I worthy to unloose
The latchet of my shoe;
Or shake the dust from off my feet
Or the staff that bears me through
On ground that is too good to last,
Too solid to be true.

Men grow too old to woo, my love,
Men grow too old to wed;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Hung crazily overhead
Incredible rafters when I wake
And I find that I am not dead.

A thrill of thunder in my hair:
Though blackening clouds be plain,
Still I am stung and startled
By the first drop of the rain:
Romance and pride and passion pass
And these are what remain.

Strange crawling carpets of the grass,
Wide windows of the sky;
So in this perilous grace of God
With all my sins go I:
And things grow new though I grow old,
Though I grow old and die."
— G.K. Chesterton (The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton)

"I said I *liked* being half-educated; you were so much more *surprised* at
everything when you were ignorant."
— Gerald Durrell (My Family and Other Animals)

"I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate."
— Kathy Acker

"There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways."
— Richard Dawkins (Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder)

"Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time."
— Diane Ackerman

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction"
— Rachel Carson

"I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that the delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it."
— Edmund Burke

"“You’re life is a pained one until he shows up… then it’s the most wonderful.”"
— Melinda Pitkin

"At some point, one asks, "Toward what end is my life lived?" A great freedom comes from being able to answer that question. A sleeper can be decoyed out of bed by the sheer beauty of dawn on the open seas. Part of my job, as I see it, is to allow that to happen. Sleepers like me need at some point to rise and take their turn on morning watch for the sake of the planet, but also for their own sake, for the enrichment of their lives. From the deserts of Namibia to the razor-backed Himalayas, there are wonderful creatures that have roamed the Earth much longer than we, creatures that not only are worthy of our respect but could teach us about ourselves."
— Diane Ackerman (The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds)

"I'm no more a wonder than anyone. And that's what makes the world magical. Every baby's a seed of wonder - that gets watered or it doesn't."
— Dean Koontz (Relentless: A Novel)

"What if I'm not the superhero? What if I'm the bad guy?"
— edward Cullen