“Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in.”

American Beauty [movie]

“Sometimes in our confusion, we see not the world as it is, but the world though eyes blurred by the mind.”

Anonymous

“He realized how miserable and unknown and vulnerable he was in the world. The universe seemed to shriek and clatter and roar around him like a huge and indifferent jalopy rushing down a hill and toward the lip of a bottomless chasm. ”

The Running Man, Richard Bachman (Stephen King) Recommended by Shay.

“The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book.”

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

“Man can allow himself to denounce the total injustice of the world and then demand a total justice which he alone will create. But he cannot affirm the total hideousness of the world. To create beauty, he must simultaneously reject reality and exalt certain of its aspects. Art disputes reality, but does not hide from it.”

The Rebel, Albert Camus

“Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed?”

The Hours, Michael Cunningham

“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”

The Dead Poet's Society [movie]

“I know that sometimes all I can see is how I feel
Like the whole world is on the other side of a dirty windshield
And I am trying to see through the glare
Yeah I'm struggling just to see what is there.”

Virtue, Ani DiFranco Recommended by Shay.

“But Jesus, when you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health, you worry about getting rupture or something. If everything is simply jake then you're frightened of death.”

The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

“I had a lover's quarrel with the world.”

Robert Frost

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important, in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

“Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”

Aldous Huxley Recommended by Kevin.

“It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”

The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

“My ambition was to negate. The world, whether dense or hollow, provoked only my negations. When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep; when I was supposed to speak, I was silent; when a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it. My hunger, my thirst, my loneliness and boredom and fear were all weapons aimed at my enemy, the world. They didn't matter a whit to the world, of course, and they tormented me, but I got a gruesome satisfaction from my sufferings. They proved my existence. All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.”

Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen

“A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror.”

Ken Keys

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy. Avenarius is playing a game, and for him the game is the only thing of importance in a world without importance. But he knows that his game will not make anyone laugh. When he outlined his proposal to the ecologists, he had no intention of amusing anyone. He only wished to amuse himself. I said, 'You play with the world like a melancholy child who has no little brother.'”

Immortality, Milan Kundera

“In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so. ”

Angels in America, Tony Kushner Recommended by Shay.

“It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Annarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren't beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me...But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, and they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can't always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn't enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Annares, nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free--possessing nothing, they are free. And you, the possessors, are the possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes--the wall, the wall!”

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin

“If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eyes, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge. If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always much stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.”

The Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller

“The more you reach out toward the world the more the world retreats. Nobody wants real love, real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand in his sacred entrails - that's only for the priest in the hour of sacrifice. While you live, while the blood's still warm, you are to pretend that there is no such thing as blood and no such thing as a skeleton beneath the covering of flesh. Keep off the grass! That's the motto by which people live.”

Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller

“We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.”

Ode, Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy

“Every addiction is just a way to treat this same problem. Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it is all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple. Language is just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. People can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.”

Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk