Margins Quotes

1. "P. and J. did not like books set in large type with wide margins, such as pleased readers of more refined tastes, but rather pages set in small type stretching all the way across tightly justified lines, filled to the brim with words and sentences, like those enormous rustic dishes you can eat at long and heartily without every emptying them, and are all that can satisfy some gigantic appetites."
Author: Albert Camus

2. "The individuals inside are frequently fighting that their individual voices be heard, while the walls of the place, which are the mask, and the perception, are reluctant to give over to the voices of the individuals. Those in the margins are always trying to get to the center, and those at the center, frequently in the name of tradition, are trying to keep the margins at a distance. Part of the identity of a place is the tension between those in the margins, and those in the center, and they all live behind the walls which wear the tradition."
Author: Anna Deavere Smith

3. "My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way."
Author: Anne Lamott

4. "The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change but not for another day or two. Along the meadows' edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay."
Author: Anne Rivers Siddons

5. "Answers seemed to float through the space around him. It was about love. It was about getting handed at conception a gift that sets you apart from everyone and you spend your whole life drifting through the margins of time, not understanding hours like everyone else seems to: glancing at wristwatches, checking timetables - you hardly know what it is people are trying to accomplish when they go through their days: morning, noon, evening, night. Wake up and sleep and wake up. This was about family, how blood superseded death; it was about trying your hardest, it was about snow."
Author: Anthony Doerr

6. "Concentration and mental toughness are the margins of victory."
Author: Bill Russell

7. "To have a man whose name is on the label showing such interest, commitment, and determination for the best is a wonderful thing. This is someone who will throw money at quality, who believes in being the best. Never knock it. Would you prefer to have a bean counter in corporate headquarters, someone who never comes near the brewery, making decisions solely on the basis of the bottom line and profit margins?"
Author: Charles W. Bamforth

8. "If you don't mind haunting the margins, I think there is more freedom there."
Author: Colin Firth

9. "Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it."
Author: Cornel West

10. "I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults."
Author: Desiderius Erasmus

11. "How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature."
Author: Don DeLillo

12. "If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely."
Author: Don DeLillo

13. "Know your margins; then focus on growing the business."
Author: Ehab Atalla

14. "According to the anthropic principle proponents, if the universal constants (e.g. gravitation, the strong force, etc.) were just a nose-hair off, the universe as we know it would not exist; stars wouldn't form and there would be no life and no us. That supposedly makes our universe truly special. To demonstrate just how ridiculous this fine-tuning argument is, consider the fact that no measurement in physics is perfect. All of them are approximations and have margins of error. That means the universal constants, that make our universe what it is, have some wiggle room. Within that wiggle room are an infinite quantity of real numbers. Each of those real numbers could represent constants that could make a universe like ours. Since there are an infinite number of potential constants within that wiggle room, there are an infinite number of potential universes, like ours, that could have existed in lieu of ours. Thus, there is really nothing special about our universe."
Author: G.M. Jackson

15. "No daylight to separate us.Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away."
Author: Gregory Boyle

16. "Compassion isn't just about feeling the pain of others; it's about bringing them in toward yourself. If we love what God loves, then, in compassion, margins get erased. 'Be compassionate as God is compassionate,' means the dismantling of barriers that exclude."
Author: Gregory Boyle

17. "Pema Chodron, an ordained Buddhist nun, writes of compassion and suggests that its truest measure lies not in our service of those on the margins, but in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them."
Author: Gregory Boyle

18. "Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much."
Author: Gregory Maguire

19. "Perhaps, indeed, there are no truly universal ethics: or to put it more precisely, the ways in which ethical principles are interpreted will inevitably differ across cultures and eras. Yet, these differences arise chiefly at the margins. All known societies embrace the virtues of truthfulness, integrity, loyalty, fairness; none explicitly endorse falsehood, dishonesty, disloyalty, gross inequity. (Five Minds for the Future, p136)"
Author: Howard Gardner

20. "I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library."
Author: J.D. Salinger

21. "At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above the seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

22. "Think how weird profit margins are: We've got high unemployment and financial crises - and world record profit margins. People think the American market is very cheap. We don't. The market quite incorrectly gives full credit to today's earnings."
Author: Jeremy Grantham

23. "A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published."
Author: Jim Jarmusch

24. "The ideal-worker standard and norm of work devotion push mothers to the margins of economic life. And a society that marginalizes its mothers impoverishes its children. That is why the paradigmatic poor family in the United States is a single mother and her child."
Author: Joan C. Williams

25. "Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur."
Author: Joanna Russ

26. "May occasionally pay lip-service to their value, but it ultimately has no real use for artists, dancers, poets, self-sufficient farmers, tree lovers, devoted followers of what it views as non-materialist cults — Christian or otherwise — handicraft workers, makers of their own beer, or, for that matter, stay-at-home moms and dads, all of whom, when they endure at all, do so at the margins and on the periphery of the social economy."
Author: John Taylor Gatto

27. "It won't workI look before I leapI love margins and disciplineI make lists in my sleepBaby what's my sin?Never quit-I follow throughI hate mess-but I love youWhat to do with my impromptu baby"
Author: Jonathan Larson

28. "When public policy is directed toward urban spaces, it is directed toward people who sit at the margins."
Author: Julianne Malveaux

29. "But you will no doubt agree that the very best staff plans are those which give clear margins of error to allow for those days when an employee is ill or for one reason or another below par."
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

30. "I learned how to draw from being bored in school. I would doodle on the margins of my paper."
Author: Kevin Nealon

31. "I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books. Not just for what they contain. I love them as objects too, as ever-present reminders of what they contain, and because they are beautiful. They are one of my favorite things in life, really at the tiptop of the list, easily my favorite inanimate things in existence, and ... I am just not cottoning on to this idea of making them ... not exist anymore. Making them cease to take up space in the world, in my life? No, please do not take away the physical reality of my books."
Author: Laini Taylor

32. "Writers are first and foremost observers. We lose ourselves in the watching and then the telling of the world we find. Often we feel on the fringes, in the margins of life. And that's where we belong. What you are a part of, you cannot observe."
Author: Lisa Unger

33. "Of course there always will be darkness but I realize now something inhabits it. Historical or not. Sometimes it seems like a cat, the panther with its moon mad gait or a tiger with stripes of ash and eyes as wild as winter oceans. Sometimes it's the curve of a wrist or what's left of romance, still hiding in the drawer of some long lost nightstand or carefully drawn in the margins of an old discarded calendar. Sometimes it's even just a vapor trail speeding west, prophetic, over clouds aglow with dangerous light. Of course these are only images, my images, and in the end they're born out of something much more akin to a Voice, which though invisible to the eye and frequently unheard by even the ear still continues, day and night, year after year, to sweep through us all."
Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

34. "The boundaries of this world are forever shifting – from day to night, joy to sorrow, love to hate, and from life itself to death; and who can say at what moment we may suddenly cross over the border, from one state of existence to another, like heat applied to some flammable substance? I have been given my own ever-changing margins, across which I move, continually and hungrily, like a migrating animal. Now civilized, now untamed; now responsive to decency and human concern, now viciously attuned to the darkest of desires."
Author: Michael Cox

35. "...when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was...this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art."
Author: Orhan Pamuk

36. "Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?What primal night does Man touch with his senses?Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:Love is a war of lightning,and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,and a genital fire, transformed by delight,slips through the narrow channels of bloodto precipitate a nocturnal carnation,to be, and be nothing but light in the dark."
Author: Pablo Neruda

37. "Instead of a book, what if we're actually writing (or not writing) in the margins of our lives? What if our lives are books? What is the sign of our presence? Are we pressing into the margins our interpretations and questions? Are we circling offending verbs and drawing furious arrows to the margin where we scrawl "irony," "frustration," "voiceless," "unfair!" Or do we simply turn the pages, passively receiving what's given, furiously disagreeing but remaining silent about it?"
Author: Patti Digh

38. "In crude oil trading, we have seen a 46 percent increase over 1 year in the margins there."
Author: Peter DeFazio

39. "My reading of American religious history is that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power. Once you identify the faith with a particular candidate or party or with the quest for political influence, ultimately it is the faith that suffers. Compromise may work in politics. It's less appropriate to the realm of faith and belief."
Author: Randall Balmer

40. "I'm living in this world. I'm what, a slacker? A "twentysomething"? I'm in the margins. I'm not building a wall but making a brick. Okay, here I am, a tired inheritor of the Me generation, floating from school to street to bookstore to movie theater with a certain uncertainty. I'm in that white space where consumer terror meets irony and pessimism, where Scooby Doo and Dr. Faustus hold equal sway over the mind, where the Butthole Surfers provide the background volume, where we choose what is not obvious over what is easy. It goes on...like TV channel-cruising, no plot, no tragic flaws, no resolution, just mastering the moment, pushing forward, full of sound and fury, full of life signifying everything on any given day..."
Author: Richard Linklater

41. "I hear you don't write any more," he says..."Not true," I inform him. "You should see the margins of my student papers.""Not the same as writing a book though, right?""Almost identical," I assure him. "Both go largely unread."
Author: Richard Russo

42. "Step off assuredly into the blank of your own mind. Something will come to you. Although at first You nod through nothing like a fogbound prow, Gravel will breed in the margins of your gaze"
Author: Richard Wilbur

43. "In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles."
Author: Robert Bringhurst

44. "People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person's faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next."
Author: Sam Harris

45. "And once again I am I will not say alone, no, that's not like me, but, how shall I say, I don't know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don't know what that means but it's the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery."
Author: Samuel Beckett

46. "Is there just one single love in a lifetime? Are all our lovers ? from the first to the last, including the most fleeting ? part of that unique love, and is each of them merely an expression of it, a variation, a particular version? In the same way that in literature there is just one true masterpiece to which different writers give a particular form (taking the twentieth century alone: Joyce, who explores everything happening inside his character;s head with microscopic precision; Proust, for whom the present is merely a memory of the past; Kafka, who drifts on the margins between dream and reality; the blind Borges, probably the one I relate to best, etc)."
Author: Sijie Dai

47. "Thing is, I don't like ties. I like to win....by big margins."
Author: Simone Elkeles

48. "Something about first love defies duplication. Before it, your heart is blank. Unwritten. After, the walls are left inscribed and graffitied. When it ends, no amount of scrubbing will purge the scrawled oaths and sketched images, but sooner or later, you find that there's space for someone else, between the words and in the margins."
Author: Tammara Webber

49. "I never minded the random scribblings of other readers, found them interesting in fact. It is a truth universally acknowledged that people write the darndest things in the margins of their books."
Author: Tara Bray Smith

50. "For under scrutiny you will find that even an open book can have a surprise scribbled in its margins."
Author: Violet Haberdasher

Margins Quotes Pictures