Quotes About Contemplation

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

By living well, by observing as you live, by reading well and observing as you read, you have fed Your Most Original Self.

I feel like I've been saving up a lot of things, and I don't know what.

Summer quiet thoughts on summer quiet noons.

It wasn't going places. It was being between...Mostly it was space. So much space. I liked the idea of nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, and a lot of nothing in between, and me in the middle of the nothing.

Chapter 31 NOTHING MUCH else happened, all the rest of that night.

Let me alone, said Mildred. I didn't do anything. Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. how long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.

Maybe I don't have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don't we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?

He walked toward the corner, thinking little at all about nothing in particular.

This was all he wanted now. Some sign that the immense world would accept him and give him the long time needed to think all the things that must be thought.

They read the long afternoon through, while the cold November rain fell from the sky upon the quiet house. They sat in the hall because the parlor was so empty and gray-looking

Three in the morning, thought Charles Halloway, seated on the edge of his bed. Why did the train come at that hour? For, he thought, it's a special hour. Women never wake then, do they?

Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page, from the second and so on, chain-smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the secondhand notions and time-worn philosophies.

They want to know what I do with all my time. I tell them that sometimes I just sit and think. But I won't tell them what. I've got them running.

Nearby, an old man was similarly engaged in finding the pattern of his life in the depths of his glass.

No one said anything. We all just looked up at the sky and we breathed out and in and we all thought the same things, but nobody said.

Leaning into the wall as if all of the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there.

Then, left alone, shivering, I happened to glance up. I stood, I froze, blinking up through the drift, the drift, the silent drift of blinding snow. I saw the high hotel windows, the lights, the shadows. What's it like up there? I thought. Are fires lit? Is it warm as breath? Who are all those people? Are they drinking? Are they happy? Do they even know I'm HERE?

On the front porch where she had come to weigh them quietly with her eyes, her quietness a condemnation, the woman stood motionless.

I think of her hands but I don't see them doing anything at all. They just hang there at her sides or they lay there on her lap or there's a cigarette in them, but that's all.

The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years.

I wish I had known him, but he was just another shadow outside my screen door and I already had a sufficiency of shadows in.

When Douglas walked, his mind ran, when he ran, his mind walked.