Bewilderment Quotes
"I always tried to tell him the truth, if I knew it and it wasn’t lethal."
"His arms pinwheeled as they did when words defeated him."
"The kitchen reeked of damp towels and plaster—the scents of a temperate rain forest."
"His pronouncements were off-the-wall mysteries to everyone except me."
"Life is something we need to stop correcting."
"We drove from the cabin, down seventeen winding miles along a stunning river."
"I couldn’t be angry. Even yanked from sleep, I was glad he was still stargazing."
"Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing."
"When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, there’s something wrong."
"The suggestions were plentiful, including syndromes linked to the billion pounds of toxins sprayed on the country’s food supply each year."
"Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory."
"Teaching is like photosynthesis: making food from air and light."
"But in my infant discipline, that was magic enough."
"She turned her voice into this Platonic public radio announcer."
"The life we’d found in Earth’s harshest regions could easily thrive in many of the regions now springing up throughout space."
"Anger makes me clam up. It’s a deep-seated trait, one that has often saved me."
"They’re trapped inside themselves, right? Same as everyone."
"I’m not passing judgment on your parenting."
"I doubt my son smashed his only friend’s face because of a week in the Smokies."
"It’s no biggie. Kids laughed. It was fun."
"You’re not toast, Robbie. Get a tissue and wipe."
"My house is burning down. Do you want me to wait until the school bell rings before I rush home to put it out?"
"What’s grief? The world stripped of something you admire."
"We live suspended between love and ego."
"I’ll stay with you. There’ll always be food enough."
"Why is it so hard for people to see what’s happening?"
"We're just an experiment, right? And you always say, an experiment with a negative result isn’t a failed experiment."
"The flowers were going somewhere, and the ships weren’t."
"Remember how Chester would tear up a book or pee on the carpet? You couldn’t really get mad at him because, he was just a dog, right?"
"You know how when you sing a good song with people you like? And people are singing all different notes, but they sound good together?"
"I don’t know where to start. Like, more than half our migrating birds use the river, but they can’t because they’re losing their habitat."
"That’s why we’re breaking the whole planet."
"Hanging up on him got easier with practice."
"Knowledge democratized and sciences went crowdsourced and bite-sized."
"People are moved by gangster films and three-chord songs and commercials for cell phone plans."
"I’m not scared anymore. I’m all mixed into a really huge thing. That’s the coolest part."
"I can’t even remember what I can’t remember."
"We bathed them in signals for thousands of their generations. We never managed to get their attention."
"The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence."
"All those civilizations out there. They’re gonna wonder why they never heard from us."