William Wharton Quotes

Love is a combination of admiration, respect, and passion. If you have one of those going, that's par for the course. If you have two, you aren't quite world class but you're close. If you have all three, then you don't need to die; you're already in heaven.

There's no end to the absurd things people will do trying to make life mean something.

Not many people are interested in what somebody else is thinking, or what they have to say. The best you can hope for is they'll listen to you just so you'll have to listen to them.

People can't fly because they don't believe they can. If nobody ever showed people they could swim, everybody'd drown if they were dropped into the water.

Things come apart much easier than they go together.

Movement is most of what a bird is. When they're dead, they're only feathers and air.

He's convinced most human adults do not know how to play anymore and that playing is one of the best ways to think. Franky finds children, by far, much more pleasant and intelligent than most adults, but they are easily ruined by their families, schools, and society. He says one of the ways they are ruined is by being forced to think of all the tasks that need to be done as work, not as play. It takes the joy out of living.

Sometimes looking so hard can make one blind.

The first time I flew, it was being alive. Nothing was pressing under me. I was living in the fullness of air; air all around me, no holding place to break the air spaces. It's worth everything to be alone in the air, alive.

It occurs to me one evening as I'm feeding the birds that all I did was put two birds in the aviary, some food and water and nothing else and now there are six of them. I know this is perfectly natural, it's one of the things life is all about, but to have it happen in my bedroom, under my own eyes, is magic.