Quotes from David Abram

The friendship between my hand and this stone enacts an ancient and irrefutable eros, the kindredness of matter with itself.

Acertain blue of the sky is so damn blue that only blood could be more red.

the living world—this ambiguous realm that we experience in anger and joy, in grief and in love—is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity.

Active, living speech is just such a gesture, a vocal gesticulation wherein the meaning is inseparable from the sound, the shape, and the rhythm of the words.

We cannot experience any entity in its totality, because we are not pure, disembodied minds, but are palpable bodies with our own opacities and limits.

Is it the shadow itself that looks out through our eyes at midday? Small wonder that so many traditional peoples give themselves over to siesta, and sleep, for an hour or two at this time, letting their tissues and organs respond to this interior visitation by the night, allowing the many cells or souls within them to be tutored by the darkness that has taken temporary refuge within their flesh.

is the mountain that lends its gregarious power to the multiple elements of this place.

For magicians -- whether modern entertainers or indigenous, tribal sorcerers -- have in common the fact that they work with the malleable texture of perception.

Yet few are as deep-rooted and damaging as the habitual tendency to view the sensuous earth as a subordinate space—whether as a sinful plane, riddled with temptation, needing to be transcended and left behind; or a menacing region needing to be beaten and bent to our will; or simply a vaguely disturbing dimension to be avoided, superseded, and explained away.

No matter how long I linger with any being, I cannot exhaust the dynamic enigma of its presence.

The Socratic-Platonic psychê, in other words, is none other than the literate intellect, that part of the self that is born and strengthened in relation to the written letters.

This animal body, for all its susceptibility and vertigo, remains the primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains our primary cosmos.

While persons brought up within literate culture often speak about the natural world, indigenous, oral peoples sometimes speak directly to that world, acknowledging certain animals, plants, and even landforms as expressive subjects with whom they might find themselves in conversation.

The atmosphere is a subtle ocean steadily generated and rejuvenated by the diverse entities that dwell within it, a fluid medium of exchange between the plants and the animals and the weathered rocks.

As breathing involves a continual oscillation between exhaling and inhaling, offering ourselves to the world at one moment and drawing the world into ourselves at the next, so sensory perception entails a like reciprocity, exploring the moss with our fingers while feeling the moss touching us back, at one moment gazing the mountains and at the next feeling ourselves seen, or sensed, from that distance Ã¢â'¬Â¦

Phenomenon," in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., signifies "an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition." It is commonly contrasted with the term "noumenon" (from the Greek nooumenon: "that which is apprehended by thought"—itself derived from the Greek term nous, for "mind").

For the timbre of a human voice singing a single sustained note carries an abundance of information for those whose ears are tuned to such clues—information about the internal state of various organs in the singer's body, and the relative tension or ease in that person, the level of aggression or peaceful intent.

Although we've lately come to associate gravity with heaviness, and so to think of it as having a strictly downward vector, nonetheless something rises up into us from the solid earth whenever we're in contact with it.

One's relation to one's house, in other words, is hardly a relation between a pure subject and a pure object—between an active intelligence, or mind, and a purely passive chunk of matter.

Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.

I had rarely before paid much attention to the natural world. But my exposure to traditional magicians and seers was shifting my senses; I became increasingly susceptible to the solicitations of nonhuman things. In the course of struggling to decipher the magicians' odd gestures or to fathom their constant spoken references to powers unseen and unheard, I began to see and to hear in a manner I never had before.

along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.

Breathing involves a continual oscillation between exhaling and inhaling, offering ourselves to the world at one moment and drawing the world into ourselves at the next...

Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.