Enormously Quotes

“There's a limit beyond which one cannot progress. The differences between the limiting abilities of those on successively higher steps of the pyramid are enormous. I have not seen described anywhere the shock a talented man experiences when he finds, late in his academic life, that there are others enormously more talented than he. I have personally seen more tears shed by grown men and women over this discovery than I would have believed possible.”

“We are born into a world that is much bigger than ourselves, one that is both enormously frightening and enormously beautiful. Although we walk the path of our individual lives alone we are always surrounded by the love of those who came before and those who are currently with us. We are part of a continually expanding web of evolution in a world where energy is neither created nor destroyed and the spirits of all living beings share our struggles and joys – we only have to look beyond ourselves to see them.”

“There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don’t notice at what point that you’re actually overwhelmed by this. There’s no showiness, at all. It’s the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have a notion of where the beauty was.(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)”

“I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant”

“Simplicities are enormously complex. Consider the sentence "I love you".”

“The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.”

“I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.”

“You see, that's another thing that my parents gave me: an enormously great sense of humor.”

“Killing someone usually turns out to be an enormously complicated solution to what was a much simpler problem.”