Insubstantial Quotes

#1. Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.

Joyce Carol Oates

#2. I'd found heaven and grabbed it as tightly as I could, but it was unraveling, an insubstantial thread sliding between my fingers, too fine to hold.

Maggie Stiefvater

#3. My past identity separates from me and remains in the past; he becomes someone else. Is memory really as insubstantial as the fragments of information that we store in our heads?

Hideo Kojima

#4. Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

Hosea Ballou

#5. She spoke slowly and breathlessly but she was smiling a happy smile. We stepped up and hugged her. She felt cold and frail and insubstantial. She felt like she weighed less than her aluminum walker.

Lee Child

#6. He reached for a tabletop and ran his hands over it, clutching the edge until his knuckles turned white.
He wanted to know that it was solid. Eddis knew that all the world would seem to him insubstantial, as if it might tear away and reveal something else infinitely larger and more terrifying.

Megan Whalen Turner

#7. Most of her feelings she deemed insubstantial and she sent them packing with barely a nod of recognition. But her feelings for her daughter she recognized as inevitable, irresistable, and she reveled in them.

Cathleen Schine

#8. Built on the insubstantial foundation of our feelings, the life we had created together seemed a figment of our imaginations that dissolved into fairy dust in the face of something real, and deadly, like cancer.

Kim Van Alkemade

#9. Dreams are real. This is unreal. This world is unreal. Everybody has it backwards. This is the dream. This is an insubstantial pageant. Nothing here lasts - that is how you know it's the dream.

Frederick Lenz

#10. I opened my mouth to tell her that everything would be okay, but the words melted like sugar on my tongue-sweet yet insubstantial.

Rachel Vincent

#11. To exist without awareness, that was what you aimed at. Memories worn to irrelevance, the future equally insubstantial.

Daniel Polansky

#12. To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.

Jan Morris

#13. I came to feel very, very sentimental about those sets, which is ludicrous, because they represent everything which is transitory and insubstantial. It's absurd that one should feel sentimental about timber and canvas.

Patrick Stewart

#14. No dish changes quite so much from season to season as soup. Summer's soups come chilled, in pastel colors strewn with herbs. If hot they are sheer insubstantial broths afloat with seafood. In winter they turn steaming and thick to serve with slabs of rustic, crusty bread.

Florence Fabricant

#15. I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains.

Carlo Rovelli

#16. Perhaps Eurydice wants to remain marginal, a shade insubstantial ... the mute waste in a limbo without light and without depth are a style of anima fascinations in which the absence of significance is the significance.

James Hillman

#17. When we begin from a place of belief, no matter how small or insubstantial, we can see what was always there, hidden in plain sight.

Christie Purifoy

#18. The ifs and buts of history ... form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet.

Vikram Seth

#19. Before his dreams had been fragile, insubstantial things, like strands of gossamer and they would fall apart and fade as soon as his eyes opened to the light of a new morning.

John Carter

#20. A man may be accused of cowardice for fleeing away from all manner of physical dangers but when things supernatural, insubstantial and inexplicable threaten not only his safety and well-being but his sanity, his innermost soul, then retreat is not a sign of weakness but the most prudent course.

Susan Hill

#21. She was plagued again by the feeling that the room in which she stood, the earth on which it was built, and the universe in which it turned were as insubstantial as smoke, subject to sudden change. (pg. 249)

Dean Koontz

#22. The days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.

Penelope Lively

#23. Attraction and aversion create a sense of self. There is no self. They are just thoughts. They are insubstantial. When you die, all the ideas of self will go away.

Frederick Lenz

#24. Fear was a reminder that even the insubstantial could kill. But insubstantial meant it had no shape. It couldn't be conquered or tamed or avoided. Only moved through, with force and will.

Roshani Chokshi

#25. Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.

Stephen King

#26. She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

Maggie O'Farrell

#27. I want to lie down and sleep, exhausted by all these puzzling, insubstantial, ridiculous, fleeting thoughts. Yes, when I feel afraid I want to go to sleep - the soul's refuge from panic.

Nina George

#28. [P]eople are insubstantial. They never last. All this fuss, it's all fuss about nothing. We're here for a while and then we're gone. People are insubstantial. They never last at all.

J.G. Farrell

#29. I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

Sophocles

#30. There's something almost weightless about our world, I think, something fleeting and insubstantial that's ill at ease with any pretence of certainty.

Deirdre Madden

#31. Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.

Walter Lippmann

#32. Subtle and insubstantial, the expert leaves no trace; divinely mysterious, he is inaudible. Thus he is master of his enemy's fate.

Sun Tzu

#33. And if it played its cards right they could end up flitting through the Overlook's halls like insubstantial shades in a Shirley Jackson novel, whatever walked in Hill House walked alone, but you wouldn't be alone in the Overlook, oh no, there would be plenty of company here.

Stephen King

#34. A man is only as effective as the effect he has on his surroundings,' Gordon was saying. 'And if a man is not effective, if his very being is as insubstantial as thought, then what is this man? Is he a man? Or is he merely the thought of a man?

Derek Landy

#35. According to quantum field theory, fields alone are real. They are the substance of the universe and not 'matter'. Matter is simply the momentary manifestation of interacting fields which, intangible and insubstantial as they are, are the only real things in the universe.

Gary Zukav

#36. The memory seems both real and unreal, reliable and tenuous, solid and insubstantial.

Rabih Alameddine

#37. Try as i do, i can't recall her surname. Indeed, her very abstractedness and insubstantial personality seemed to say 'forget me'; she seemed to live in parenthesis; ...

Muriel Spark

#38. Fear comes at me like a massive bull with lowered horns ready to gore. But I have learned of the insubstantial nature of fear: if I stand my ground, it will pass right through me.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#39. Critics are the products of their own times and biases and what they have to say about works of art is as transient and insubstantial as fashion.

Robert Genn

#40. I fear books; for I have heard it said, and I think it true, that a man who
spends long enough in their company grows at last unmindful of the world outside their covers, and lives finally in a twilight world of fantastic things and places as insubstantial as dreams.

Chris Naylor

#41. I sometimes think people can see that I'm defective, that there's nothing there. Behind the job and clothes and makeup there's nothing to know. I sometimes think I'm this shell and I can't work out why people like me. And when I'm with strangers it reminds me of that. That I'm insubstantial.

Dorothy Koomson

#42. Her absence is a presence, ghostly and haunting, touching all who knew her. It is impossible that she disappeared, inconceivable that she will never return. She is at once nowhere and everywhere, a constant shadow, elusory and insubstantial, her life an unkept promise, a half-remembered dream.

Christina Baker Kline

#43. I only used a cell phone for the first time after I was released. I had difficulty coping with it because it seemed so small and insubstantial.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#44. The compelling thing about making art - or making anything, I suppose - is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances.

Audrey Niffenegger

#45. There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#46. A goal that is not in writing is like cigarette smoke: It drifts away and disappears. It is vague and insubstantial. It has no force, effect, or power. But a written goal becomes something that you can see, touch, read, and modify if necessary.

Brian Tracy

#47. Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world?

Euripides

#48. There are those who will seek to block you. There are also non-physical forces. To win in the world of enlightenment, it is necessary to be able to will away these forces, to see they're insubstantial.

Frederick Lenz

#49. The blue smoke rose into the blue air, solemn, beautiful as all that day. I stood there long after everyone else was gone, and my life seemed to me to have as much meaning as that wavering and insubstantial column, or as the dead grass that fed it.

Howard Spring

#50. The softest of stuff in the world, penetrates quickly the hardest, insubstantial, it enters where there is no room ...

Laozi

#51. The outer world in all its variety and our inner world of thoughts and emotions are not as they seem. All phenomena appear to exist objectively, but their true mode of existence is like a dream: apparent yet insubstantial.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#52. The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. That which is not known of does not trouble us, while an imagined but insubstantial peril does not harm us. To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden.

H.P. Lovecraft