Quotes About Contemplation

I wasn't good company, that was true, and people avoided me, but that was all right. I was too busy dreaming.

A person got to really see things if she wasn't racing through life

His wife was beside him, buried in pillows. He was fifty-one and would be a new father again by the end of the year. This morning, woken by the wind, he had put his thumb to each fingertip, counting decades.

Some vestige of his race or of his sex made him think, whenever he looked out across the ocean: As it was before me and as it will be long after I'm gone. For the second time today, he touched his thumb to his fingertips. He could make it to the 1980s or 1990s, perhaps even to the next century, when the new baby would be grown, maybe with children of his or her own. But even with the best of luck, it would not be equal to the time he'd already spent.

it—and he peered around at her from under its brim as if from under the rock of another life.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.

This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.

Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide--sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. I lived in a state of siege, always losing just what I wanted to hold on to[...] It was being a watcher that did it. A watcher, not a keeper.

People have thoughts they'd sooner not have. It happens in life.

The work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life.

En su momento pensó que no podría vivir sin café, pero resulta que en realidad lo que quiere entre las manos es el tazón caliente; eso es lo que ayuda a pensar o a hacer lo que haga durante la sucesión de las horas, o de los días.

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

I don't take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere... I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It is more like a house. Alice Munro on reading.

I don't take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere... I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It is more like a house.

A gente pensa umas coisas que preferia não pensar. Acontece na vida.

Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn't calculate my steps. I didn't have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from the shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping to land away from where you are.

The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. I think she listens, she said, too softly to be heard.

But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out

About Grandma Lynn: She was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. At seventy, she had come to believe in time alone.

She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.

She held on to two sides of an hourglass and wondered how this could be possible. The time she'd had alone had been gravitationally circumscribed by when her attachments would pull her back. And they had pulled now – doublefisted.

If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.