Quotes About Contemplation

gave him a look. Okay. Only to himself

Being alone is a matter of choice.

Fragmentos de céu me espiam através das folhas, um mosaico azul e verde que se altera suavemente com o vento. Fixo a vista ali e me deixo perder o foco, olhando para além das folhas e dos galhos. Um esquilo salta pesadamente, a cauda bem empinada, cruzando meu campo de visão. Water for Elephants, p.22

For the rest of the night, all I could think about was how many heads had lain on those pillows before my own.

I stepped forward, as Màiri once had, until my feet were at the water's edge. I took another step, just a little one, so that the soles of my shoes were submerged. I watched the water swirl around them, then looked up at the loch itself, black and rolling, endlessly deep.

Only Uncle Pascha ignored her. He was contemplating his chessboard. She doubted that he'd move his piece today. It had been his turn for only six months. Once, he had gone three years between moves. He preferred a leisurely game.

I took in a breath. What's the one thing you'd do, I asked. if you could do anything? Pass, he said. For a second I was sure I'd heard wrong. What? He cleared his throat. I said, I pass. Why? He turned his head and looked at me. Because. Because why? Because I just do.

From what I could see, the hardwood was just fine. Then again, I'd just see a windmill and an open sky, too, never feeling the need to conquer either. You think it's all obvious and straightforward, this world. But really, it's all in who is doing the looking.

All I'd ever thought I wanted was to be left alone. Until I was.

The silence wasn't like the ones I'd known lately, though: it wasn't empty as much as chosen. There's a entirely different feel to quiet when you're with some-one else, and at any moment it could be broken. Like the difference between a pause and an ending.

So finally, I decided that the best response — the safest — was none at all.

Once, she'd been a pro at decompressing, loved to sit on the back deck of the beach house in one of our splintery Adirondack chairs for hours at a time, staring at the ocean. She never had a book or the paper or anything else to distract her. Just the horizon, but it kept her attention, her gaze unwavering. Maybe it was the absence of thought that she loved about being out there, the world narrowing to just the pounding of the waves as the water moved in and out.

Maybe it was the absence of thought that she loved about being out there, the world narrowing to just the pounding of the waves as the water moved in and out.

Again, I was speechless. What do you do when you finally hear everything you've always thought said aloud?

The silence wasn't like the ones I'd known lately, though; it wasn't empty so much as chosen. There's an entirely different feel to quiet when you're with someone else, and at any moment it could be broken. Like the difference between a pause and an ending.

The light shifts around the dais to the scratching of the chalk on the page, each line careful, considered, the result of a singular communion between the eye and the hand.

More and more often these days days, though, Holly found herself thinking that perhaps what God wanted was not to be feared or obeyed or even to be worshiped - but maybe God just wanted to be wondered about.

Sometimes a single sentence can be enough to fill the imagination completely. And sometimes a book's title is enough.

I would like to curl up and become a small thing. About this big. And still. Very still. Have you ever become so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved's hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence?

the theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake. Ruhl, Sarah. 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater (p. 103). Faber & Faber. Kindle Edition.

La Solitude est un condition necessaire de la liberte.

Supongo que uno no puede prever los inconvenientes de la soledad.

The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

So things go on as before with those who think a great deal and effect nothing, and those who think nothing evidently doing it all...