Circle Quotes

“This place,' Annabel waved her left arm in a circle. 'It is a place filled with misery, hatred, jealousy ... and then there are the lawyers.”

— Tanya Thistleton

“Don't be afraid to make corrections! Whether the voice came from her memory or was a last whisper from the blinding new star far above, Nita never knew. But she knew what to do. While Kit was still on the first part of the name she pulled out her pen, her best pen that Fred had saved and changed. She clicked it open. The metal still tingled against her skin, the ink at the point still glittered oddly- the same glitter as the ink with which the bright Book was written. Nita bent quickly over the Book and with the pen, in lines of light, drew from the final circle an arrow pointing up-ward, the way out, the symbol that said change could happen- if, only if-”

— Diane Duane

“Some of us go full circle. Some of us blindly go nowhere. The circle doesn't have to be very large to make a point, kick your ass and/or be entertaining. Remember that and stay light. Even the deaf know good music when they hear it.”

— Jason Mraz

“We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.”

— Albert Schweitzer

“We came to Macun when I was four, to a rectangle of rippled metal sheets on stilts hovering in the middle of a circle of red dirt.”

— Esmeralda Santiago

“I stepped out of the circle of his arms with reluctance and patted him on his butt. "That'll do, donkey," I said, in my best Scottish accent.”

— H.D. Gordon

“Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like.”

— Woodrow Wilson

“We are not perfect in ourselves, but in Him we are. In the red circle of this world, there is no hope. However, because you're living in the purple wedge, there is always His hope, power, and joy.”

— Van Harden

“Normally death came at night, taking a person in their sleep, stopping their heart or tickling them awake, leading them to the bathroom with a splitting headache before pouncing and flooding their brain with blood. It waits in alleys and metro stops. After the sun goes down plugs are pulled by white-clad guardians and death is invited into an antiseptic room.
But in the country death comes, uninvited, during the day. It takes fishermen in their longboats. It grabs children by the ankles as they swim. In winter it calls them down a slope too steep for their budding skills, and crosses their skies at the tips. It waits along the shore where snow met ice not long ago but now, unseen by sparkling eyes, a little water touches the shore, and the skater makes a circle slightly larger than intended. Death stands in the woods with a bow and arrow at dawn and dusk. And it tugs cars off the road in broad daylight, the tires spinning furiously on ice or snow, or bright autumn leaves.”

— Louise Penny

“One is only really inwardly comfortable, so to speak, after one's life has assumed some sort of shape. Not just a routine, like studying or a job or being a housewife, but something more complete than all those, which would include goals set by oneself and a circle of life-time type friends. I think this is one of the hardest things to achieve, in fact often just trying doesn't achieve it but rather it seems to develop almost by accident.”

— Jessica Mitford

“Circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell-the strange inverse sense of apartheid.”

— Chris Abani

“The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them.”

— Benjamin Franklin

“He's actually not that good with breasts in general, actually. I mean, it's not like I really know what it's supposed to feel like, but every time he touches my boobs he kind of just massages them hard in a circle. My guno does the same thing when I go in for an exam, so one of them has to be doing it wrong. And to be honest, I don't think it's my gyno.”

— Lauren Oliver

“Winter? She traced a circle on his breastbone, her touch”

— Elizabeth Hoyt

“The world seems almost physically wider when up to just now the
right-hand side was always obscured by the proximity of someone else;
and all of a sudden you stand there, astonished, in a wide
semi-circle: alone.”

— Robert Musil

“Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees; Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

“If you think about it, we get robbed of the mystery of being alive. I think we get robbed of the glory of it because we don't remember how we got here. When you get born, you wake up slowly to everything. From birth to 26, God is slowly turning on the lights, and you are groggy and pointing at things, and say "Circle," and, "Blue,", and, "Car," and, "Sex," and then, "Job," and, "Healthcare". The experience is so slow, you could easily come to believe life isn't that big of a deal, that life isn't staggering. Life IS staggering, and we are just too used to it.”

— Donald Miller

“The King and Queen made the rounds after the film. We were told how we were to respond, and we were in a semi circle in the lounge area of the cinema, they came around after the King, the Queen and both Princesses.”

— Kim Hunter

“It happens that "society is saved" as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an "assault upon society" and is branded as "Socialism.”

— Karl Marx

“And always, in my pocket, in my skin, in the back of my mind, the hollowness where he used to be. The empty circle where my finger used to fit into the ring. The crimson flakes and ruby dust strewn across the ledges of my ribs.”

— Leah Raeder

“It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“Mattie was in love with Daniel, of course; this was the X within the circle on her map: I love Daniel.”

— Anne Lamott

“I missed the currency of ideas. In London we had been part of a wide circle of solicitors' families, and social occasions had been mentally stimulating as well as entertaining.”

— Tracy Chevalier

“When a crime is committed, only the victim and the victim's close circle experience the event as pain, terror, death. To people hearing or reading about it, crime is a metaphor, a symbol of the ancient battles fought every day: evil versus good, chaos versus order.”

— S. J. Rozan

“Just beyond the edges of our little circle of sunshine, a ferocious war was going on.”

— Haruki Murakami

“The Circle had 90 percent of the search market. Eighty-eight percent of the free-mail market, 92 percent of text servicing. That was, in her perspective, a simple testament to their making and delivering the best product. It seemed insane to punish the company for its efficiency, for its attention to detail. For succeeding.”

— Dave Eggers

“I have only to go stubbornly on towards my aim, and I shall attain my end", thought Levin; "and it's something to work and take trouble for. This is not a matter of myself individually; the question of the public welfare comes into it. The whole system of culture, the chief element in the condition of people, must be completely transformed. Instead of poverty, general prosperity and content; instead of hostility, harmony and unity of interests. In short, a bloodless revolution, but a revolution of the greatest magnitude, beginning in the little circle of our district, then the province, then Russia, then the whole world. Because a just idea cannot but be fruitful. Yes, it's an aim worth working for.”

— Leo Tolstoy

“Before newborns open their eyes, we circle them, appearing as brilliant colors, and when they clench their tiny hands for the first time, they are actually grabbing the colors they find most appealing.”

— Mitch Albom

“One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living ... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry ...”

— Thomas Pynchon

“When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame decided to open up the voting beyond their inner circle, to the actual fans, that's when I think everything changed.”

— John Oates

“I don't think global warming is to do with us, I think it's a natural circle. I don't think a few Ferraris make that much difference.”

— David Bailey

“OF course they did,' she snapped back. 'According to them, you single-handedly won a dozen battles, restored the Spanish throne, and infiltrated Napoleon's inner circle, after which you rode an elephant, wrestled a crocodile, and swam the Straits of Gibraltar.”

— Eloisa James

“My whole life is a practical joke. Every evening and every show has really become about entertaining me. I was always like that. And now I've come full circle because that's what the TV show is too.”

— Howie Mandel

“Then again, maybe you couldn't have killed me," he said, crawling out of the stairway. He moved very slowly, like a lizard who had gotten too cold.
I heard a whimper from behind one of the closed doors next to the bathroom, and sympathized. I wanted to whimper, too.
"I'm not hunting you," I told him firmly, though I stepped backward until I stood in a circle of light at the end of the hallway.
He stopped halfway out of the stairway, his eyes were filmed over like a dead man's.
"Good," he said. "If you kill Andre, I won't tell-and no one will ask."
And he was gone, withdrawing from the hallway and down the stairs so fast that I barely caught the motion, though I was staring right at him.
I walked out of his home because if I'd moved any faster, I'd have run screaming.”

— Patricia Briggs

“So I talk about original cultures that saw the presence of god in all living things- including women. Only in the last five hundred to five thousand years- depending on where we live in the world- has godliness been withdrawn from particular races of men, all in order to allow the conquering of nature, females, and certain races of men. Though patriarchal cultures and religions have made hierarchy seem inevitable, humans for 95 percent of history have been more likely to see the circle as our natural paradigm.”

— Gloria Steinem

“It makes sense that introverts are uniquely good at leading intiative-takers. Because of their inclination to listen to others and lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions. Having benefited from the talents of their followers, they are then likely to motivate them to be even more proactive. Introverted leaders create a virtious circle of proactivity.”

— Susan Cain

“I liked the idea of a self-contained, endless pursuit of perfection. But I have a problem with perfection. I don't think perfection is very artful. But there's something I liked about the image of a skater going in this endless twisted circle that doesn't have any real endpoint. So the object is not to stop or arrive anywhere; it's just to make this thing as beautiful as they can.”

— Elliott Smith

“It is clear that the way to heal society of its violence ... and lack of love is to replace the pyramid of domination with the circle of equality and respect.”

— Manitonquat

“It's a great life, and Margaret and I are going to stay put above the Arctic Circle where we're happy.”

— Bern Will Brown

“I've been lucky with the circle of people I'm playing with. We've played enough that there's a language we talk with each other when we play.”

— Bill Frisell

“People always ask me about the intent of witchcraft and what it is used for. The answer in 'white' covens is simple: it is to be use the powers for good amongst the circle and its friends.”

— Vivianne Crowley

“The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media
movies, Telstar, flight
far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I have learned a new form of service from the wars of Frederick, king of Prussia. It is not necessary to approach the enemy in order to attack him. In fleeing from him, it is possible to circumvent him as he advances and fall on him from the rear and force him to surrender. What is needed is not to strike straight at evil but to withdraw to the sources of divine power, and from there to circle around evil, bend it and transform it into its opposite.”

— Martin Buber

“Wherefore it is impossible to succeed in comparing wealth of different eras or different nations. This, in political economy, like squaring the circle in mathematics, is impracticable, for want of a common mean or measure to go by.”

— Jean-Baptiste Say

“The only people that really matter are the people that are in my inner circle.”

— Terrell Owens

“If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for [Barack] Obama but also for the Democrats.”

— John Howard

“Enlightened beings are rare in the universe. They are the joker in the deck. They are outside the circle.”

— Frederick Lenz

“A woman ... all beautiful and accomplished will, while her hand and heart are undisposed of, turn the heads and set the circle in which she moves on fire. Let her marry, and what is the consequence? The madness ceases and all is quiet again. Why? Not because there is any diminution in the charms of the lady, but because there is an end of hope.”

— George Washington

“This is the pleasantest part of life. Oblivion throws her light coverlet over our infancy; and, soon after we are out of the cradle we forget how soundly we had been slumbering, and how delightful were our dreams. Toil and pleasure contend for us almost the instant we rise from it: and weariness follows whichever has carried us away. We stop awhile, look around us, wonder to find we have completed the circle of existence, fold our arms, and fall asleep again.”

— Walter Savage Landor

“To understand the whole it is necessary to understand the parts. To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole. Such is the circle of understanding.”

— Ken Wilber