Quotes About Contemplation

The return of solitude was not quite as Dina expected it to be. These many years I made a virtue of inescapable reality, she thought, calling it peace and quiet.

I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

If I had to create a god, I would lend him a "slow understanding": a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.

A cold winter night. I'm warm enough, yet I'm alone. And I realize that I'll 'have' to get used to existing quite 'naturally' within the solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, 'fastened to' the presence of absence.

Here and there, on the trees, some leaves remain. And I often stand deep in thought before them. I contemplate a leaf and attach my hope to it. When the wind plays with the leaf, I tremble in every limb. And if it should fall, alas, my hope falls with it. - Schubert

People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle. —PAUL AUSTER, SMOKE

They profess to aim only at a reform of the constitution and of certain abuses in the public administration, but an abolition of debts public and private and a new division of property are strongly suspected in contemplation.

Not for the last time, Pierpont contemplated retirement.

think she was also thinking, perhaps, of Justine, up there in the big house among the tall candles and the oil-paintings by forgotten masters.

By now night had fully occupied the sky, which was splattered with stars that seemed merely a few feet away. I can see why religions are born in the desert, Henry said. Yes, we have this problem, Majid said. God is always on top of us.

I want to be alone. I don't want to be alone. My days pop like bubbles. There is no one to remember the things that have happened to me.

We both sat there mute, as if we were in a no-talking competition and serious about winning.

Reacher said nothing.

Don't go anywhere, don't do anything, don't call anyone. I guessed talking with the guy would amount to doing something, which would contravene the don't do anything part of the command. But then, breathing was doing something, technically. So was metabolizing. My hair was growing, my beard was growing, all twenty of my nails were growing, I was losing weight. It was impossible not to do anything. So I decided that component of the order was purely rhetorical.

He looked at them and wondered if they were the fools, or if he was.

watching, both

I had rambling on my mind.

stopped. She looked at it like she was having second

outside the door. He breathed in, and he breathed

She didn't talk. She was thinking. She often was. He knew the signs. He guessed she was processing the information she had received, examining it, turning it this way and that, until she was satisfied.

Perhaps he would glance down and see that he was doing 76 miles an hour, and he would see that 76 squared was 5,776, which ended in 76, where it started, which made 76 an automorphic number, one of only two below 100, the other being 25, whose square was 625, whose square was 390,625, which

house. Out of sight, out of mind. That was the way he wanted it. He crossed the shoulder and leaned on his mailbox, watching

Generally I avoid having things to do. Clearly a reaction against literal regimentation earlier in my life. The result is I have no particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there.

Dawn on New Year's Day is as close as any inhabited place gets to absolute stillness.