Awestruck Quotes

You seemed so far away," Miss Honey whispered, awestruck. "Oh, I was. I was flying past the stars on silver wings," Matilda said. "It was wonderful.

Find one thing. One thing that's beautiful. Anything. Anything that shows you you're not one of them." His eyes were back on me studying my face silently. Panic raced through me. It wasn't working. I couldn't do this. We were going to have to get out of here, regardless of whatever state he was in. I knew he'd leave, too. If i had learned anything, it was that Dimitri's warrior instincts were still working. If I said danger was coming, he would respond instantly, no matter the self-torment he felt. I didn't want him to leave in despair. I wanted him to leave here one step closer to being the man I knew he could be. I wanted him to have one less nightmare. It was beyond my abilities, though. I was no therapist. I was about to tell him we had to get out of there, about to make his soldier reflexes kick in, when he suddenly spoke. His voice was barley a whisper. "Your hair." "What?" for a second, I wondered if it was on fire or somthing. I touched a stray lock. No, nothing was wrong exept that it was a mess. I'd bound it up for battle to prevent the strgoi from using it as a handhold, like Angeline had. Much of it had come undone in the struggle, though. "Your hair," repeated Dimitri. His eyes were wide, almost awestruck. "your hair is beautiful.

Wait--we have one left," the runner said, bringing out what was surely the most expensive bouquet of all: a three-foot tall arrangement of two hundred white roses, in the palest ivory color. All the girls swooned. Almost no boys bought white roses ever. It was a big sign of commitment. But this one practically trumpeted a captured heart. The runner set the bouquet in front of Schuyler. Mimi raised an eyebrow. She had always won the roses lottery. What was this all about? For me?" Schuyler asked, awestruck by the size of the thing. She took the card from the tallest stem. For Schuyler, who doesn't like love stories." It was not signed.

I'm awestruck that you had warm cabbages sitting around.

I desired to praise the Chosen One and was hindered By my own inability to grasp the extent of his glory. How can one such as I measure an ocean, when the ocean is vast? And how can one such as I count the stones and the stars? If all of my limbs were to become tongues, even then – Even then I could not begin to praise him as I desired. And if all of creation gathered together in an attempt To praise him, even then they would stint in his due. I have altogether ceased trying – awestruck, clinging to courtesy, Tempered by timidity, glorifying his most exalted rank. Indeed, sometimes silence holds within it the essence of eloquence, And often speech merely fodder for the faultfinder.

mysterium tremendum et fascinans-- that stomach- flipping mix of awestruck fear and entrancing fascination.

You have until midnight.” The silence swallowed them all again. Every head turned, every eye in the place seemed to have found Harry, to hold him frozen in the glare of thousands of invisible beams. Then a figure rose from the Slytherin table and he recognized Pansy Parkinson as she raised a shaking arm and screamed, “But he’s there! Potter’s there! Someone grab him!” Before Harry could speak, there was a massive movement. The Gryffindors in front of him had risen and stood facing, not Harry, but the Slytherins. Then the Hufflepuffs stood, and almost at the same moment, the Ravenclaws, all of them with their backs to Harry, all of them looking toward Pansy instead, and Harry, awestruck and overwhelmed, saw wands emerging everywhere, pulled from beneath cloaks and from under sleeves.

Your hair," repeated Dimitri. His eyes were wide, almost awestruck. "Your hair is beautiful." I didn't think so, not in its current state. of course, considering we were in a dark alley filled with bodies, the choices were kind of limited. "You see? You're not one of them. Strigoi don't see beauty. Only death. You found something beautiful. One thing that's beautiful." Hesitantly, nervously, he ran his fingers along the strands I'd touched earlier. "But is it enough?" "It is for now." I pressed a kiss to his forehead and helped him stand. "It is for now.

If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered , and engaged , you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul.

Your head could fit in the muzzle of this thing," Vik said, awestruck. "Seriously. Come on and let's see." "I'm not sticking my head in a cannon thing. Stick your own head in." "I have highly temperamental hair. It'll get nestlike. You don't care when your hair gets nestlike, Tom. You can't possibly.

Awestruck, Flora stared at the dishevelled sisters with their blazing faces and radiant ragged wings, who smelled of no kin but the wild high air.

as she spoke, she watched the expressions on the faces go from incredulous shock, to hopeful belief, and finally to awestruck acceptance

It was the first time! Just because there weren’t fireworks the first time doesn’t mean there will never be fireworks. We’re human; we’re adults; we teach each other; we communicate; fireworks don’t just go off, wham-bang; fireworks evolve!’ Awestruck by the utter, asinine nonsense of this metaphor, everyone is still. Into the stillness, the ample woman drops the word ‘Wrong.’ Then she says it again. ‘Wrong…I’m talking about science…Pheromones.’ The woman turns to Cornelia. ‘The chemicals in his body call out. The chemicals in your body answer. It either happens or it doesn’t.’ On top of being dumb, Cornelia is dumbfounded.

In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the Children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck trough the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning...Every night a world created, complete with furniture- friends made and enemies established; a world complete with braggarts and with cowards, with quiet men, with humble men, with kindly men. Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus.

I was almost awestruck when I realized that like this meant without a condom. Jack's vulnerability shone through him in that exact moment like a lighthouse beacon in a raging storm. Somewhere along the way, we'd crossed an imaginary line where feelings and emotions blurred into the unknown. A place neither of us dared to go before.

Sometimes we go along, thinking "Ah, this is it - this is what true peace feels like…" Then, in a moment of grace, something shifts in our hearts, and in awestruck wonder, we whisper, "oh my, I just didn't know there could more...

Worry is useless. Worry saps our strength and steals our focus. It causes us to be more awestruck and dumbfounded by storms than by the one who silences storms with a word.

PRIOR (An awestruck whisper): God almighty. Very Steven Spielberg.

It seems there’s nothing like millions of sparkling stars to make you feel both awestruck and inconsequential

I am awestruck that life can give us such breathtaking beauty.

At length the Turk turned to Larry: 'You write, I believe?' he said with complete lack of interest. Larry's eyes glittered. Mother, seeing the danger signs, rushed in quickly before he could reply. 'Yes, yes' she smiled, 'he writes away, day after day. Always tapping at the typewriter' 'I always feel that I could write superbly if I tried' remarked the Turk. 'Really?' said Mother. 'Yes, well, it's a gift I suppose, like so many things.' 'He swims well' remarked Margo, 'and he goes out terribly far' 'I have no fear' said the Turk modestly. 'I am a superb swimmer, so I have no fear. When I ride the horse, I have no fear, for I ride superbly. I can sail the boat magnificently in the typhoon without fear' He sipped his tea delicately, regarding our awestruck faces with approval. 'You see' he went on, in case we had missed the point, 'you see, I am not a fearful man.

Later, when I was a new mother, I recognized her somewhat awestruck fascination with me. When you are fully immersed in the daily care and quirks and habits of a small, dependent child, an older kid who is articulate, civilized, and capable of moving around in the world without getting itself killed can seem as supernatural as a wizard.

Let’s take down the gold leaf,” Caldenia said. “Elegance is never ostentatious, and there is nothing more bourgeois than covering everything in gold. It screams that one has too much money and too little taste, and it infuriates peasants. A palace should convey a sense of power and grandeur. One should enter and be awestruck. I’ve found the awe tends to cut down on revolts.

The author nicely encapsulates Paul's overarching intent in his letter to Corinth, to impress upon those in the church infatuated with the gifts of the Spirit a greater awestruck awareness of His presence in and among them. The author then illustrates thusly: if we have but a few coins, we may carry them lightly with little concern as to whether we lose them. But if we are aware that we carry a great sum, we will carry it with great care. How much more the Treasure of the Holy Spirit within the earthen vessel of our bodies?

I have no idea what I’ve done wrong, so I shrink back and he catches it. He points a finger at me, “Don’t. Don’t do that.” Then he sighs, “Fuck me.” Placing my hair behind my ear, he murmurs an awestruck, “So much sweet tucked behind the fierce. I don’t know what to do with you, girl. You’re killin’ me.

We are artists. We are writers—slightly neurotic and probably addicted to coffee, late nights, sunsets, laughter, tears, and heartache. Creativity is our drug. We lose ourselves in the smell of old books. We’re bewildered by how we can live in a world this full of glory and grief and not be awestruck every moment. And we write stories to help wake people up before they fall asleep for good.

For all the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an inspiration. The stars were comforting. They seemed to demonstrate that the heavens were created for the benefit and instruction of humans. This pathetic conceit became the conventional wisdom worldwide. No culture was free of it. Some people found in the skies an aperture to the religious sensibility. Many were awestruck and humbled by the glory and scale of the cosmos. Others were stimulated to the most extravagant flights of fancy.

I’m not single but in a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend, who lives in the future.

It's you." My eyes shoot upward. The prince of Midas stares down at us, horrified and awestruck. His lips tilt a little to the left. "Look at you." He whispers. "My little monster, come to find me.

...he was the proud owner of a quite colossal member, which on the many awestruck occasions it had been exposed to public view had been compared variously to a giant frankfurter, an overfed python, a length of led piping, the trunk of a rogue elephant, a barrage balloon, an airport-sized Toblerone and a roll of wet wallpaper.

He envied this in them, this ability they had to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvellous years were not behind them.

Ah me! what hand can pencil guide, or pen, To follow half on which the eye dilates Through views more dazzling unto mortal ken. Than those whereof such things the bard relates, Who to the awe-struck world unlocked Elysium’s gates?

That kiss had left me awe-struck. It was earth-shattering in its simplicity, mind-numbing in its intimacy, and completely raw in its emotional depths.

But such people (Moderate Conservatives) aren't liberal. What they are is corporate. Their habits and opinions owe far more to the standards of courtesy and taste that prevail within the white-collar world than they do to Franklin Roosevelt and the United Mine Workers. We live in a time, after all, when hard-nosed bosses compose awestruck disquisitions on the nature of 'change,' punk rockers dispense leadership secrets, shallow profundities about authenticity sell luxury cars, tech billionaires build rock'n'roll musuems, management theorists ponder the nature of coolness, and a former lyricist fro the Grateful Dead hail the dawn of New Economy capitalism from the heights of Davos. Coversvatives may not understand why, but business culture had melded with counterculture for reasons having a great deal to do with business culture's usual priority - profit.

Halfway down, Eric stopped and stared at her, an awestruck look in his eyes. “What is it?” she asked. “Your hair. Even in moonlight . . . it looks like sunshine. I’d never have to go outside again if I was with you.” She tugged him forward. “I think you hit your head in your heroic struggles.” “You were the heroic one,” Eric said, stepping around a rock bend. “Reminds me of the stories from Russia my grandmother used to tell me. You know any of them? Vasilisa the Brave?” “Nope. My family’s from Romania. Never heard of any Vasilisa.” Looking up, Rhea stare up at the sky thoughtfully. “But I kind of like that name.

Why Roses Crave Thorns" Petals detach from a wilting bud—a single stem plucked before fully blossomed. They descend in hesitant swirls, too soft and limp to shatter like teardrops. One by one they light to blanket a single shadow below. She is a rose, young and innocent, with beauty incomparable to shame all others. She has flowered enough to stop the observer in his tracks, awestruck. He is compelled to reach out and touch. The petals delight at a silken caress, her bud everything desirable but defenseless—without a sharp edge to make an admirer pause, to warn the intrusive hand. ‘Stay back! Stay back!’ His fingers curl around the stem to tug, and suddenly the rose craves a thorn. It is madness not to want her and yet madness to cut her down. Let the flower thrive and blush to someday flaunt layers of silken favors! But the world will not have it. A single stem is severed in a selfish moment of desire—a yearning to hold and possess. Alone and forgotten her petals cry, raining in hesitant swirls where they accumulate to blanket her shadow below. Dry, withered, craving the thorns. Beautiful no more.

We leave this behind in your capable hands, for in the black-foaming gutters and back alleys of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some galactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewer like seas, in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums . . . my awe-struck little deer and I have gone frolicking.

The trick to realize that the boys who talk so much about being rejected that it seems like the’re proud of it aren’t necessarily sweeter or more sensitive than the Bababooey-spouting frat bullies who line up at clubs like SkyBar to run game on girls they want to date rape. There are plenty of nerds who fear women and aren’t sensitive, despite their marketing; they just dislike women in a new, exciting way. Timid racists aren’t sensitive because they lock their car doors when they see a black person on the street. They’re just too scared to get out of the car and shout the “N” word. Fear can be the result of admiration, or it can be a symptom of contempt. When I see squeamish guys passing over qualified women when they’re hiring for a job, or becoming tongue tied when a girl crashes their all-boy conversation at a party, I don’t give them credit for being awestruck. They’re reacting to the intimidating female as an intruder, an alien, and somebody they can’t relate to. It’s not a compliment to be made invisible.

To this day, I remain awestruck by the fact that human beings are capable of this type of metamorphosis. We don’t have to stay stuck displaying the same personality traits over the course of our lifetime but are free to transform into higher expressions of ourselves. Today I can honestly say that I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that human beings are capable of making radical and lasting change. After a decade of coaching individuals and leading groups, I have discovered that if I don’t buy into people’s perceptions of who they are and what they are capable of, I can bypass their public personas and see who they are in their highest expression. With a little effort, I can see their magnificence and their potential no matter what they look like or what condition their emotional, spiritual, or financial world is in. I can see through their acts, their personas, their fears and insecurities. I can see who they are apart from the baggage they carry around. The undeniable fact is that underneath all of our public personas, we already are that which we desire to be. Our only job is to see past our own limitations so that we can return to that which we already are.

... my subjects’ willingness to brave bullying and condemnation in order to reveal their individual selves makes it impossible to be nothing less than awestruck.

Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruck by the absolute stillness and inconceivable vastness of

I was fascinated with her instantly. Awestruck. Enamored. Fuck, I was practically in love. I would have followed her anywhere.

Yet this tough, pragmatic man with his finely tuned sense of justice and honor also had a huge, vulnerable heart and respect for the creative spirit that verged on the awestruck.

They were AWESTRUCK. They were BEWILDERED and DAZZLED.

Yale Law School was like nerd Hollywood, and I never stopped feeling like an awestruck tourist.

What do you do when just looking at someone renders you completely and totally awestruck?

Good horror movies scare you, but great horror movies leave you awestruck.

awestruck.

Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.

He’s like the tiger shark in Jaws. The one Dreyfuss cuts open in the fisherman’s basement. That’s why we named him Hooper. You remember the tiger shark? He had a license plate in his stomach?” “I never saw Jaws. I caught one of the sequels on TV in rehab. The one with Michael Caine.” Another silence followed, this one awestruck and wondering. “Jesus. No wonder we didn’t last,” Lou said.

I question what it would be like to just let someone in, to tell them all of your unforgivable truths and discover they still love you in return. I find myself utterly fascinated, awe-struck even, that there are people actually capable of truly loving someone without wondering when and how they will be betrayed.

From the days of our ancestors, those forgotten few who birthed us all, mankind has gazed awestruck into the heavens above. Night falls and the brilliant blue sky rolls away, allowing us a brief glimpse into a universe we will never fully understand. Yet we do not need its secrets to bathe in its beauty. Its empty blackness resonates in the depths of our souls, kindling a longing in our hearts that we can never fill.

Maya had one of those sudden “pow” moments sneak up on her, the ones all parents experience, when you are simply overwhelmed by your love for your child, when you are awestruck and you can feel something rising inside of you and you just want to hold onto it and yet, at the same time, that caring, that fear of losing this person, scares you into near paralysis. How, you wonder, will you ever relax again, knowing how unsafe the world is? Lily

The children and their parents were too flabbergasted to speak. They were STAGGERED. They were AWESTRUCK. They were BEWILDERED and DAZZLED. They were completely bowled over by the HUGENESS of the whole thing. They simply STOOD AND STARED.

Oh what marvels fill me with thanksgiving! The deep mahogany of a leaf once green. The feathered fronds of tiny icicles coating every twig and branch in a wintry landscape. The feel of goosebumps thawing after endured frozen temperatures. Both hands clamped around a hot mug of herbal tea. The aromatic whiff of mint under my nose. The stir of emotion from a child's cry for mommy. A gift of love detached of strings. Spotted lilies collecting raindrops in a cupped clump of petals. The vibrant mélange of colors on butterfly wings. The milky luster of a single pearl. Rainbows reflecting off iridescence bubbles. Awe-struck silence evoked by any form of beauty. Avocado flecks in your eyes. Warm hands on my face. Sweetness on the tongue. The harmony of voices. An answered prayer. A pink balloon. A caress. A smile. More. These have become my treasures by virtue of thanksgiving.

Only once was there a question which YISUN hesitated to answer. Strangely enough, it was asked by Aesma, the least wise of their companions. They trode a stony road together, and Aesma’s feet grew hot and sore. She swore and spat, and clutched her feet, and asked YISUN a stupid question. “Lord!” said she, in roiling frustration, “Before you said there is no such thing as Universal Truth!” “It was so,” said YISUN. “Then what is all this! This foolery!” said Aesma, with an exaggerated sweep of her ashen arms, “Isn’t creation itself, the entirety of your own grand work, a self-evident truth? The only self evident truth, in fact!” “It is not so,” said YISUN, stopping their pace. “Then what is it?” wailed Aesma, starting to tantrum. This was the question that caused YISUN to hesitate. They meditated on it for a short time only, but Aesma was aghast with wonderment at the power of the question. “My opinion,” said YISUN, finally. “Is it a correct opinion?” said Aesma, awestruck. “Aesma is observant,” said YISUN.

They had been awestruck not only at the sight of the Alps by moonlight but by the depthless inky-black skies, pricked with thousands upon thousands of stars—bright seed broadcast by some generous god, Teddy thought, drifting dangerously close to the forsaken realm of poetry. There were sunsets and dawns of thrilling grandeur and once, on a run to Bochum, a spectacular show that the Northern Lights put on for them—a vibrating curtain of colours draped in the sky that had left them searching for superlatives. In

When you think of yourself as lucky, you notice all the good things in your life. You see all the connections between what you do and what happens next. You watch the amazing, mysterious, coincidental ways the world works, and you will be awestruck" -Aunt Jenny

The food chain is an aspect of nature. Survival of the fittest is also a natural law. Yet it is easy to take these facts and assume that they apply to every social function and all other aspects of life. Social demands for disrespect are numerous: "buy a bigger car", "have sex with more women", "show no respect for other people", "drive like a complete jerk", etc., etc. Unfortunately, this is overlooked by quite a lot of those who've witnessed and been awestruck by real power. The demands of the noble are: "respect yourself", "be what you are", "don't conform

He envied this in them, this ability they had to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them. What must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world's pleasures?

No sunrises that stop you dead with their unspeakable beuaty, either, he thought. No whales breaching only yards away from the ship, showering your awestruck self with a cold ocean rain. No songs and whiskey belowdecks at night while the wind plucks at the ship's rigging and the ice beats against her hull.

He envied this in them, this ability they had to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them... What must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world's pleasures?

It's . . . Titian," Genevieve breathed. "I'm sure of it." A slow, awestruck, disbelieving smile took over her face. Stunned pleasure shone from her eyes. And he was certain her heart was racing with the sheer delight of being in the presenceof the thing. Because his heart was racing at simply watching her love it.

As we advance in the spiritual life and in the practice of systematic self-examination we are often surprised by the discovery of vast unknown tracts of the inner life of the soul. They seem like great plains stretching out in mystery and wrapt in mists that sometimes for a moment lift, or sweep off and leave one looking for one brief instant upon great reaches of one’s own life, unknown, unmeasured, unexplored. Men stand at such moments breathless in wonder and in awe gazing upon these great tracts upon which they have never looked before, with kindling eyes and beating hearts; and while they look the mists steal back till all is lost to sight once more and they are left wondering if what they saw was reality, or the creation of their fancy. Or sometimes they see, not far-stretching plains which fill the soul with an awestruck sense of its expansiveness and of how much has been left absolutely uncultivated, not these plains but mountain peaks climbing and reaching upwards till lost in the heavens, echoing it may be with the voice of many streams whose waters fertilize and enrich those small tracts of the soul’s life which have been reclaimed and cultivated and which many a man has thought to be his whole inner self, though he never asked himself whence those rich streams had their source. Now he sees how their source lay in unmeasured heights of his own inner being whose existence he never dreamed of before. In one brief instant they have unveiled themselves. He looks again, and they are shut out from his eyes, there is no token visible that he possesses such reaches, such heights of life. The commonplaces of his existence gather in and crowd upon him, the ordinary routine of life settles down upon him, limiting and confining him on all sides, the same unbroken line measures his horizon, such as he has always known it, the same round of interests and occupations crowd in upon his hours and fill them, the pressure of the hard facts of life upon him are as unmistakable and as leveling as ever, bidding him forget his dreams and meet and obey the requirements of the world in which he lives. And yet the man who has caught but a momentary glimpse of that vast unknown inner life can never be the same as he was before; he must be better or worse, trying to explore and possess and cultivate that unknown world within him, or trying—oh, would that he could succeed!—to forget it. He has seen that alongside of, or far out beyond the reach of, the commonplace life of routine, another life stretches away whither he knows not, he feels that he has greater capacities for good or evil than he ever imagined. He has, in a word, awakened with tremulous awe to the discovery that his life which he has hitherto believed limited and confined to what he knew, reaches infinitely beyond his knowledge and is far greater than he ever dreamed.

When Moses heard the voice of God, he shook with terror and hid his face in the folds of his robe. Why? Because he was about to receive a couple of chapters of the book of Exodus? No! He was awestruck because the voice he heard made real and immediate the presence of the Holy One of Israel. In the words, Moses met God. And so can we.

The meadow was small, perfectly round, and filled with wildflowers — violet, yellow, and soft white. Somewhere nearby, I could hear the bubbling music of a stream. The sun was directly overhead, filling the circle with a haze of buttery sunshine. I walked slowly, awestruck, through the soft grass, swaying flowers, and warm, gilded air.

To become a tourist assumes a certain vulnerability, to wear the wrong shoes and not know the right times for meals. To drive too slow, alert for photographable moments, because you're awestruck that beauty exists in the world and, amazingly enough, we all happened to find it on the same damn day. To be a tourist is to be filled with wonder.

The Thanksgiving myth casts the Wampanoags in 1620 as naive primitives, awestruck by the appearance of the Mayflower and its strange passengers. They were nothing of the sort. Their every step was informed by the legacy of the many European ships that had visited their shores and left behind a wave of enslavement, murder, theft, and mourning.

Darkness fell, revealing a sparkling night sky so beautiful that we decided to sleep out under the stars. At gray dawn, Phyllis woke me with an urgent voice. “Bill, Bill,” she said, “when I woke up I saw this huge boulder beside me, but it wasn’t there last night. Look! Look!” she said and pointed next to her. It was the huge buffalo bull! He had come back during the night and lay down beside us to sleep. I was awestruck. I felt so honored, so grateful, so loved. I loved that buffalo with all my heart and soul. I felt like he knew it, and that was why he had come back to sleep with us. But maybe there’s a different reason. Judith Niles, a wise spiritual friend of mine recently told me that the spontaneous melody is “the voice of the soul.” The minute she said it I knew she was right. Now I feel sure that the creatures responded to “the voice of the soul” amplified through my body. When we human beings finally get it together the natural world is going to respond to us in more wonderful ways than we can ever begin to imagine.

nothing truly great came from a comfort zone.

I was discovering that my body was shallow and easily swayed by muscles and cut jaws and manly forearms.

This was the problem with eating at a restaurant so fancy. I didn’t know which fork to pick up and stab him with.

Those years in the back diningroom, like some dark tunnel through which one emerges into sunshine, had ended for her in glory. All the time she had been so miserable, she had really been heading straight for this. She was awestruck. Such great and unexpected blessings should bring forth fruit, she vowed, and she would show her gratitude by seeing to it that they did.

In order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor and venture into his fold, the colonized subject has to pawn some of his own intellectual possessions. For instance, one of the things he has had to assimilate is the way the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks. This is apparent in the colonized intellectual's inaptitude to engage in dialogue. For he is unable to make himself inessential when confronted with a purpose or idea. On the other hand, when he operates among the people he is constantly awestruck. He is literally disarmed by their good faith and integrity. He is then constantly at risk of becoming a demagogue. He turns into a kind of mimic man who nods his assent to every word by the people, transformed by him into an arbiter of truth. But the fellah, the unemployed and the starving do not lay claim to truth. They do not say they represent the truth because they are the truth in their very being. During this period the intellectual behaves objectively like a vulgar opportunist. His maneuvering, in fact, is still at work. The people would never think of rejecting him or cutting the ground from under his feet. What the people want is for everything to be pooled together. The colonized intellectual's insertion into this human tide will find itself on hold because of his curious obsession with detail. It is not that the people are opposed to analysis. They appreciate clarification, understand the reasoning behind an argument, and like to see where they are going. But at the start of his cohabitation with the people the colonized intellectual gives priority to detail and tends to forget the very purpose of the struggle - the defeat of colonialism. Swept along by the many facets of the struggle, he tends to concentrate on local tasks, undertaken zealously but almost always too pedantically. He does not always see the overall picture. He introduces the notion of disciplines, specialized areas and fields into that awesome mixer and grinder called a people's revolution. Committed to certain frontline issues he tends to lose sight of the unity of the movement and in the event of failure at the local level he succumbs to doubt, even despair. The people, on the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. "Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?" And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective model.

Away on his right he could see, rather indistinctly, the Western Mountains. On his left was the gleam of the Great River, and everything was so quiet that he could hear the sound of the waterfall at Beaversdam, a mile away. There was no difficulty in picking out the two stars they had come to see. They hung rather low in the southern sky, almost as bright as two little moons and very close together. “Are they going to have a collision?” he asked in an awestruck voice. “Nay, dear Prince,” said the Doctor (and he too spoke in a whisper). “The great lords of the upper sky know the steps of their dance too well for that. Look well upon them. Their meeting is fortunate and means some great good for the sad realm of Narnia. Tarva, the Lord of Victory, salutes Alambil, the Lady of Peace. They are just coming to their nearest.

All of us believe you belong here,” I’d said to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson girls as they sat, many of them looking a little awestruck, in the Gothic old-world dining hall at Oxford, surrounded by university professors and students who’d come out for the day to mentor them. I said something similar anytime we had kids visit the White House—teens we invited from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation; children from local schools who showed up to work in the garden; high schoolers who came for our career days and workshops in fashion, music, and poetry; even kids I only got to give a quick but emphatic hug to in a rope line. The message was always the same. You belong. You matter. I think highly of you. An economist from a British university would later put out a study that looked at the test performances of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson students, finding that their overall scores jumped significantly after I’d started connecting with them—the equivalent of moving from a C average to an A. Any credit for improvement really belonged to the girls, their teachers, and the daily work they did together, but it also affirmed the idea that kids will invest more when they feel they’re being invested in. I understood that there was power in showing children my regard.

It's... 'Titian,'" Genevieve breathed. "I'm sure of it." A slow, awestruck, disbelieving smile took over her face. Stunned pleasure shone from her eyes. And he was certain her heart was racing with the sheer delight of being in the 'presence' of the thing. Because his heart was racing at simply watching her love it. She turned to look at him as if he himself had painted it. Her radiance rendered him absolutely silent. He could only bask. One was either moved by something or one was not, he knew. Certain tastes- for fine wine or teas, for instance- could be acquired. 'Skill' could be acquired, but talent could not. And passion was either intimate... or it was not. He still in truth didn't care to know much about the painting. He only cared about what it did to Genevieve Eversea. And it was 'this' that gave it its value in his eyes. Not the name of the artist, or the pigments he had used. He felt her joy as his own.

Thus far then have we travelled along the terrible road we chose at the call of duty. The mood of Britain is wisely and rightly averse from every form of shallow or premature exultation. This is no time for boasts or glowing prophecies, but there is this: A year ago our position looked forlorn, and well nigh desperate to all eyes but our own. To-day we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: 'We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls.

She would never be able to console herself that she was pressured or bullied. She never was. She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist on making her own way back. She was not endowed with, or old enough to possess, such independence or spirit. An imposing congregation had massed itself around her first certainties, and now it was waiting and she could not disappoint it at the altar.

This is the place that years ago, had caught the eye of Dasani's Brooklyn principal, Miss Holmes. She had been standing in the theme park below, squinting up, saying, " What is that?". Now Dasani stands at the thop of that hill, gazing down at the park. SHe sees a tangle of roller coasters and other rides, a view that leaves her awestruck. It is hard to know which site holds more power- a theme park in the eyes of of a poor child, or a palatial school in the eyes of a Brooklyn principal.

I am also awe-struck - not by the evident heroism, but by the magnitude of the stupidity of human beings. Is all history merely the outcome, the artificially hallowed outcome, of a chance concatenation of ignorance and arrogance in some one character?

A hippogriff flew past, trailing laughter. It came so close to Will that he could smell its scent, a pungent mixture of horse sweat and milky pin-feathers, and feel the wind from its wings. Its rider’s hair streamed out behind her like a red banner. Will stared up at her, awestruck. The young woman in the saddle was all grace and athleticism. She wore green slacks with matching soft leather boots and, above a golden swatch of abdomen, a halter top of the same green color. She was glorious. The rider glanced casually down and to the side and saw Will gawking. She drew back on the reins so that her beast reared up and for an instant seemed to stall in midair. Then she took the reins between her teeth and with one hand yanked down her halter top, exposing her breasts. With the other hand, she flipped him the finger. Then, jeering, she seized the reins again, pulled up her top, and was gone. Will could not breathe. It was as if this stranger had taken a two-by-four to his heart. All in an instant, he was hers.

America’s last step into the Vietnam quagmire came on November 22, 1963, when Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States. Unlike Kennedy, Johnson was no real veteran. During World War II he used his influence as a congressman to become a naval officer, and, despite an utter lack of military training, he arranged a direct commission as a lieutenant commander. Fully aware that “combat” exposure would make him more electable, the ambitious Johnson managed an appointment to an observation team that was traveling to the Pacific. Once there, he was able to get a seat on a B-26 combat mission near New Guinea. The bomber had to turn back due to mechanical problems and briefly came under attack from Japanese fighters. The pilot got the damaged plane safely back to its base and Johnson left the very next day. This nonevent, which LBJ had absolutely no active part of, turned into his war story. The engine had been “knocked out” by enemy fighters, not simply a routine malfunction; he, LBJ, had been part of a “suicide mission,” not just riding along as baggage. The fabrication grew over time, including, according to LBJ, the nickname of “Raider” Johnson given to him by the awestruck 22nd Bomber Group.

I was too awestruck to speak. Vines of bright pink flowers danced over a wrought-iron arbor. I recognized them immediately as the very same variety, bougainvillea, that grew in Greenhouse No. 4 at the New York Botanical Garden. Just beyond, two potted trees stood at attention- a lemon, its shiny yellow globes glistening in the sunlight, and what looked like an orange, studded with the tiniest fruit I'd ever seen. "What is this?" I asked, fascinated. "A kumquat," she said. "Lady Anna used to pick them for the children." She reached out to pluck one of the tiny oranges from the tree. "Here, try for yourself." I held it in my hand, admiring its smooth, shiny skin. I sank my teeth into the flesh of the fruit. Its thin skin disintegrated in my mouth, releasing a burst of sweet and sour that made my eyes shoot open and a smile spread across my face. "Oh, my," I said. "I've never had anything like it." Mrs. Dilloway nodded. "You should try the clementines, then. They're Persian." I walked a few paces further, admiring the potted orchids- at least a hundred specimens, so exquisite they looked like Southern belles in hoop skirts. On the far wall were variegated ferns, bleeding hearts, and a lilac tree I could smell from the other end of the room.

Recorded at the same time, but not destined for release until 19 months later, was John’s ‘Across the Universe’, melding the sweetest and loneliest of his lyrics (‘Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box…’) with the mantra he’d soon be chanting in the Himalayas. He wanted a female chorus totally without artifice so, rather than professional backing singers, it was decided to use two of the fans permanently on watch outside Abbey Road studios. Paul was deputed to fetch them, and picked out a pair he recognised from his own front gate in Cavendish Avenue. The girls’ awestruck voices created just the right effect for ‘Across the

This raises a novel question: which of the two is really important, intelligence or consciousness? As long as they went hand in hand, debating their relative value was just a pastime for philosophers. But in the twenty-first century, this is becoming an urgent political and economic issue. And it is sobering to realise that, at least for armies and corporations, the answer is straightforward: intelligence is mandatory but consciousness is optional. Armies and corporations cannot function without intelligent agents, but they don’t need consciousness and subjective experiences. The conscious experiences of a flesh-and-blood taxi driver are infinitely richer than those of a self-driving car, which feels absolutely nothing. The taxi driver can enjoy music while navigating the busy streets of Seoul. His mind may expand in awe as he looks up at the stars and contemplates the mysteries of the universe. His eyes may fill with tears of joy when he sees his baby girl taking her very first step. But the system doesn’t need all that from a taxi driver. All it really wants is to bring passengers from point A to point B as quickly, safely and cheaply as possible. And the autonomous car will soon be able to do that far better than a human driver, even though it cannot enjoy music or be awestruck by the magic of existence.

So, are we worth sustaining? Life on Earth will continue without us. Yet will it not be a much impoverished place without a species capable of reflecting on the miracle of life’s evolution and able to be awestruck by the beauty of this precious planet? We have to be honest with ourselves. Even in dedicating our lives to the creation of regenerative cultures and a more sustainable future, we are not ‘saving the planet’ or ‘saving life on Earth’. Both will continue long after our species meets its almost inevitable fate of extinction. Nevertheless, we don’t have to actively accelerate our own demise, as we have done with increasing effort since the industrial revolution.

using a virus that could glue cells together, they fused the B cell with a cancer cell. I am still awestruck by the idea. How did they even think of using the undead to resuscitate the dying? The result was one of the strangest cells in biology. The plasma cell retained its antibody-secreting property, while the cancer cell conferred its immortality. They called their peculiar cell a hybridoma—a, well, hybrid of hybrid and oma, the suffix of carcinoma. The immortal plasma cell was now capable of perpetually secreting only one kind of antibody. We call this antibody of a single type (in other words, a clone), a monoclonal antibody. Milstein and Köhler’s paper was published in Nature in 1975.

Holiness means wholeness. To say “God is holy” is to refer to the wholeness, fullness, beauty, and abundant life that overflows within the Godhead. God lacks nothing. He is unbroken, undamaged, unfallen, completely complete and entire within himself. He is the indivisible One, wholly self-sufficient, and the picture of perfection. When the angels sing “Holy is the Lord,” they are not admiring him for his rule-keeping or sin avoidance. They are marveling at the transcendent totality of his perfection. To worship God in the beauty of his holiness is to be awestruck by the infinite sweep and scale of his sublimity. It is to become lost in the limitless landscape of his loveliness. Holiness is not one aspect of God’s character; it is the whole package in glorious unity.

As for the fact that Simone dared to piss on the corpse, whether in boredom or, at worst, in irritation: it mainly goes to prove how impossible it was for us to understand what was happening, and of course, it is no more understandable today than it was then. Simone, being truly incapable of conceiving death such as one normally considers it, was frightened and furious, but in no way awestruck. Marcelle belonged to us so deeply in our isolation that we could not see her as just another corpse. Nothing about her death could be measured by a common standard, and the contradictory impulses overtaking us in this circumstance neutralized one another, leaving us blind and, as it were, very remote from anything we touched, in a world where gestures have no carrying power, like voices in a space that is absolutely soundless.

A complete history of sexual scandal in Washington will probably never be written, because the public does not want to read a 20,000 page book that needs to be updated weekly (note to self: maybe they DO -- idea for next book). From the earliest days of the Republic, when our first Ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, fondled and groped the awestruck wives of his French hosts while on mission to Paris, shortly to be succeeded by the even-more-amorous Thomas Jefferson, who broke an ankle in the Louvre while leaping to an assignation with yet another married Frenchwoman, all the way down to our contemporary satyrs, the priapic Kennedys, Wilbur "Fanne Fox" Mills, "Slobbering Bob" Packwood, Bill "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" Clinton, etc., our political leaders have repeatedly proven to be incredibly horny old goats.

If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul.

Inspired by the punched railway tickets of the time, an inventor by the name of Herman Hollerith devised a system of punched manila cards to store information, and a machine, which he called the Hollerith Machine, to count and sort them. Hollerith was awarded a patent in 1889, and the government adopted the Hollerith Machine for the 1890 census. No one had ever seen anything like it. Wrote one awestruck observer, “The apparatus works as unerringly as the mills of the Gods, but beats them hollow as to speed.” Another, however, reasoned that the invention was of limited use: “As no one will ever use it but governments, the inventor will not likely get very rich.” This prediction, which Hollerith clipped and saved, would not prove entirely correct. Hollerith’s firm merged with several others in 1911 to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. A few years later it was renamed—to International Business Machines, or IBM.

Wallace had read the Tractatus, of course (he wrote to Lance Olsen that he thought its first sentence was "the most beautiful opening line in western lit"). He knew that Wittgenstein's book presented a spare and unforgiving picture of the relations among logic, language, and the physical world. He knew that the puzzles solved and raised by the book were influential, debatable, and rich in their implications. But as a flesh-and-blood reader with human feelings, he also knew, though he had never articulated it out loud, that as you labored to understand the Tractatus, its cold, formal, logical picture of the world cold make you feel strange, lonely, awestruck, lost, frightened-a range of moods not unlike those undergone by Kate herself. The similarities were not accidental. Markson's novel, as Wallace put it, was like a 240-page answer to the question, "What if somebody really had to live in a Tractatusized world?" Pronouncing the novel "a kind of philosophical sci-fi," Wallace explained that Markson had staged a human drama on an alien intellectual planet, and in so doing he had "fleshed the abstract sketches of Wittgenstein's doctrine into the concrete theater of human loneliness.

Gadzooks, lady! Where’d you learn to throw like that?” The awe in the boy’s tone brought heat to her cheeks. “A pirate taught me,” she snapped, stomping forward to reclaim her blade. For heaven’s sake. Did all males assume women to be helpless creatures incapable of fending for themselves? Pressing her shoe against the snake’s neck, she held the lifeless rattler down and yanked the knife free. There wasn’t much blood, but still, she couldn’t exactly lift her skirts and slip it back into the sheath strapped to her thigh with Darius and a child looking on in rapt attention. “A pirate, Miss Greyson?” Darius regarded her with a raised brow, obviously not as awestruck as the gaping boy at his side. She sighed. “All right, so my father was an ordinary seaman, not a pirate. But I used to imagine him a pirate while we had our lessons.” She tossed a wink at the boy. “Made it so much more fun, you know. My father ensured I was proficient with pistols, too, but I preferred the blades. So much more elegant and lighter weight. Much better suited to a lady, wouldn’t you say? Pistols are dirty things, what with all that black powder and the flash from the flintlock every time one pulls the trigger.” She gave a little shudder, and the boy cracked a smile.

People often ask me, “Do you seriously expect this idea of God to change the world? What about all the fanatics and terrorists?” All I can say is that the only thing that changes the world is an idea that lights our fire at a moment when we are surrounded by dry, dead kindling. Today is that kind of time. Spiritual transformation doesn’t require a majority vote. It doesn’t matter if most people don’t get it. All it takes is a committed minority, because the committed lead culture. The new scientific picture of the universe is a modern revelation. For many the realization that God can be real and is emerging from human aspirations will also be a revelation. That these revelations are both happening now, at so pivotal a moment for our species, is truly grace. They have helped me move into the new universe and feel blessed and awestruck every day, as though I’d moved from a dark basement apartment into a mountain aerie with a hundred-mile view in all directions. I don’t expect millions of people to change their ideas of God overnight, but to those who care about the human future and can see beyond ideology, to those who believe that truth matters, and to those who recognize the potential of humanity but don’t see how to make us rise to that potential, it could make all the difference to discover a God that is real.

He sometimes thought that the real thing that distinguished him and Malcolm from Jude and Willem was not race or wealth, but Jude’s and Willem’s depthless capacity for wonderment: their childhoods had been so paltry, so gray, compared to his, that it seemed they were constantly being dazzled as adults. The June after they graduated, the Irvines had gotten them all tickets to Paris, where, it emerged, they had an apartment—“a tiny apartment,” Malcolm had clarified, defensively—in the seventh. He had been to Paris with his mother in junior high, and again with his class in high school, and between his sophomore and junior years of college, but it wasn’t until he had seen Jude’s and Willem’s faces that he was able to most vividly realize not just the beauty of the city but its promise of enchantments. He envied this in them, this ability they had (though he realized that in Jude’s case at least, it was a reward for a long and punitive childhood) to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them. He remembered too watching them try uni for the first time, and their reactions—like they were Helen Keller and were just comprehending that that cool splash on their hands had a name, and that they could know it—made him both impatient and intensely envious. What must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world’s pleasures?

I know that you are preparing to fight." There were screams amongst the students, some of whom clutched each other, looking around in terror for the source of the sound. "Your efforts are futile. You cannot fight me. I do not want to kill you. I have great respect for the teachers of Hogwarts. I do not want to spill magical blood." There was silence in the Hall now, the kind of silence that presses against the eardrums, that seems too huge to be contained by walls. "Give me Harry Potter," said Voldemort's voice, "and they shall not be harmed.Give me Harry Potter and I shall leave the school untouched. Give me Harry Potter and you will be rewarded. "You have until midnight." The silence swallowed them all again. Every head turned, every eye in the place seemed to have found Harry, to hold him forever in the glare of thousands of invisible beams. Then a figure rose from the Slytherin table and he recognized Pansy Parkinson as she raised a shaking arm and screamed, "But he's there! Potter's there. Someone grab him!" Before Harry could speak, there was a massive movement. The Gryffindors in front of him had risen and stood facing, not Harry, but the Slytherins. Then the Hufflepuffs stood, and almost at the same moment, the Ravenclaws, all of them with their backs to Harry, all of them looking toward Pansy instead, and Harry, awestruck and overwhelmed, saw wands emerging everywhere, pulled from beneath cloaks and from under sleeves. "Thank you, Miss Parkinson." said Professor McGonagall in a clipped voice."You will leave the Hall first with Mr. Filch. If the rest of your House could follow.

Minutes later, as they lay tangled together, dazed in the aftermath of their loving, Callie began to chuckle silently against Gabriel's side. Lifting his head to find her grinning a wide, silly grin, he drawled, "What is it that has you so amused, lovely?" "I was simply thinking"- she stopped to catch her breath from the laughter and started again- "I was merely thinking that if that is what riding astride is like, the female population is missing out on one of life's finer experiences." The last word was lost as she dissolved once more onto giggles. He caught her against him in a fierce hug and sighed, unable to keep himself from smiling up at the ceiling as he said, "You know, Empress, men do not appreciate laughter at this particular moment. It's devastating to the self-confidence." Her head snapped up and she took in his amused countenance. "Oh, my apologies, good sir," she teased. "I would hate to damage such a fragile ego as that of the Marquess of Ralston." With a playful growl, he pinned her to the mattress. "Minx. You shall pay for that." And he began to kiss down the side of her neck, nibbling across her collarbone until she sighed with pleasure. "If this is how I must pay for it, my lord, you may guarantee I shall tease you a great deal in the coming months." "More than months, I hope," he drawled, distracted by her lovely white breasts. "Years. Decades even." "Decades," she repeated, awestruck. My God. He's going to be my husband. "Mmm-hmm," he murmured against her skin before pulling away from her. "Which is why, despite how very difficult it shall be for me to leave you warm and lush in your bed, I shall console myself with the fact that, very soon, I shan't have to do so ever again.

Yes, I love Peter. More than I will ever love another soul... I remember the night that she died. He left the hangar without a word. The others, Logan, Ororo, Jean... They all thought they were doing him a favor by giving him space. But that was the last thing he needed. If there was a X-Man voted "Most likely to hug"... it was Peter. I found him out by the pool, of all places. "You okay?" I asked, knowing what a stupid question it was. Also knowing that there are some times in life when only a stupid question will do. "I remember..." he began. The words choked off by his grief. A moment passed, and he try again. "I remember the first time Illyana saw the swimming pool. She was amazed... as awestruck as I was the first time I battled a Sentinel or squared off against the Brood. I thought that by bringing her here to live with us, I took pride in knowing I was introducing her to an entirely new world. But that's not true, is it? he asked, tears filling his eyes. "All I did by bringing her here... was to kill her." I wanted to tell him he was wrong. I wanted to tell him that no matter what she lost - to think of what she had gained along the way. She had seen the stars. She had witnessed first-hand the best and worst that mankind had to offer. She helped saved the world... more than once. I wanted to say all those things... to make him feel better. But I couldn't. Because I didn't believe the good outweighed the bad. And neither did he. So instead I said nothing. That how we spent the night... two best friends, holding each other. Here I am... holding him in my arms again. Only this time, I don't have to comfort him. I don't have to protect him. I don't have to do anything... but say goodbye. Welcome home, Peter Nikolaevitch Rasputin...