ŷ������

“But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.

He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.”
― John Updike

“We are so small; and what must one hold on to when one no longer recognizes one's own hands, nor one's step, nor even the small dose of everyday despair.”
― Danielle Collobert, Murder

“Smallness is subversive, because smallness can creep into smaller places and wreak transformation at the most vulnerable, cellular level. In a time when largeness is threatening to topple us, I wish to remember and praise the beauty of smallness, in order to banish the Goliath of loneliness.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro �� he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful �� yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth.”
― Álvaro de Campos

“The ant finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown's Body

“Eight o'clock, no later,
You light the lamps,

The big one by the large window,
The small one on your desk,

They are not to see by--
It is still twilight out over the sand,

The scrub oaks and cranberries.
Even the small birds have not settled

For sleep yet, out of the reach
Of prowling foxes. No,

You light the lamps because
You are alone in your small house

And the wicks sputtering gold
Are like two visitors with good stories

They will tell slowly, in soft voices,
While the air outside turns quietly

A grainy and luminous blue.
You wish it would never change--

But of course the darkness keeps
Its appointment. Each evening,

An inscrutable presence, it has the final word
Outside every door.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“For him [Kafka], the most tormenting thing about his notion of marriage must have been its ruling out the possibility of one's ever becoming so small as to be able to vanish: one has to be there.”
― Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

“I like smallness. I like the perverse audacity of someone aiming tiny.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“Let us then realize our limitations. We are something and we are not everything. Such being as we have conceals from us the knowledge of first principles, which arise from nothingness, and the smallness of our being hides infinity from our sight.”
― Blaise Pascal, �ʱ�Բ�é���

“Most of us, most of our lives, are asked to live small. Most of us quit trying very young to live the bigness we know is possible.”
― Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

“Eight o'clock, no later,
You light the lamps,
The big one by the large window,
The small one on your desk,
They are not to see by--
It is still twilight out over the sand,
The scrub oaks and cranberries.
Even the small birds have not settled
For sleep yet, out of the reach
Of prowling foxes. No,
You light the lamps because
You are alone in your small house
And the wicks sputtering gold
Are like two visitors with good stories
They will tell slowly, in soft voices,
While the air outside turns quietly
A grainy and luminous blue.
You wish it would never change--
But of course the darkness keeps
Its appointment. Each evening,
An inscrutable presence, it has the final word
Outside every door.”
― Mary Oliver Rotman, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“Allow the beauty of creation to soak deep within our souls with eye candy such as mountain or lake or ocean or countryside or forest. It reminds us how small we are and how utterly magnificent God is, and that makes His love for us all the more breathtaking.”
― Laura Thomas

“If you pour everything into the tiny vessel of a song and wear out your heart, what is that? Is that small or big? If you choose to put yourself out there on a small stage, singing for the small somebody inside of you, knowing how quickly songs wane, is that modest or gargantuan?”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“In crowds you cannot understand how big neither the world nor the universe is; but while walking alone, looking at the endless horizons, you realize both your own smallness and the greatness of the outside world!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Great man is the one who is aware of his smallness in this universe! Greatness starts first of all with accepting the reality.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“His approach, enjoying small spots of nature every day rather than epic versions of wilderness and escape, made sense to me. Big trips were the glaciers, cruise ships to Madagascar, the Verdon Gorge, the Cliffs of Moher, walking on the moon. Small trips were city parks with abraded grass, the occasional foray to the lake woods of Ontario, a dirt pile. Smallness did not dismay me. Big nature travel—with its extreme odysseys and summit-fixated explorers—just seemed so, well, grandiose. The drive to go bigger and farther just one more instance of the overreaching at the heart of Western culture.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“If I am guilty of hiding among tinier people in a tinier parallel world, it is because I am searching for other models of artistic success. The small is a figure of alternative possibility, proof that no matter how much the market tries to force consensus, there will always be those making art where the market isn’t looking.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“Sometimes you make a very small move and then suddenly a giant door opens and a new exciting path appears before you and thus you understand how something such small carries a potential to create such big magic! Now you know that small is big!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Pequeño no es insignificante. Es concentrado.”
― Giancarlo Pucci, Flor de madera. Un viaje a la intimidad del árbol. A journey to the intimacy of the tree.

“Often the first poem is the hardest, the one caught by a lifetime of being smaller than you are, trapped by your ideas of what art is, what an artist is, immobilized by the judgments of teachers whose names you may never again remember. How did we come to forget that anything true is beautiful? How young were we then?”
― John Fox, Poetic Medicine

“The most difficult thing is not the belief in the infinite. No. The most difficult thing of all is to believe that the infinite would be so grand and gracious as to reside in the smallness of us. That is what requires the greatest faith.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Sometimes, small minds seem to take the day.

Election fraud. A migratory plague.
Less and less surprises us as odd.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“Go near something big to see how small you are! How big you are, leave it to time, it will tell!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“If you focus on your physical smallness in the universe, you cannot accomplish great things; focus on the greatness of your mind!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The trial is rarely as big as the perception of our smallness has made it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“In my experience, a work's external smallness can lead somewhere internally large.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“A gross content prolongs his fallen state;
His small successes are failures of the soul,
His little pleasures punctuate frequent griefs:
Hardship and toil are the heavy price he pays
For the right to live and his last wages death.

02.05_046:004”
― Sri Aurobindo, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol

“The first law of everything is that the world don’t usually give a fuck about our problems �� we are our own little thing and the world is its own infinite thing.”
― Junot Díaz

“What a tiny part of the boundless abyss of time has been allotted to each of us �� and this is soon vanished in eternity; what a tiny part of the universal substance and the universal soul; how tiny in the whole earth the mere clod on which you creep.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations