Quotes About Contemplation

After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid.

My three prayers are variations on Help, Thanks, Wow. That's all I'll ever need, besides the silence, the pain, and the pause sufficient for me to stop, close my eyes, and turn inward.

Now, you also want to ask yourself how they stand, what they carry in their pockets or purses, what happens in their faces and to their posture when they are thinking, or bored, or afraid. Whom would they have voted for last time? Why should we care about them anyway? What would be the first thing they stopped doing if they found out they had six months to live? Would they start smoking again? Would they keep flossing? You

I let my mind wander.

that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around. Writing

They taught me to pay attention, but not so much attention to my tiny princess mind.

The trees are so huge that they shut you up.

For somebody to be on a search means he or she is involved with these subversive topics, reading and comparing notes with allies, asking questions, daydreaming, brooding. Even though you have homework to do.

Deep is so un-American now, even radical. We live too often like water skeeters on the surface of the pond, dropping down for a quick bite of insect or e-mail. Deep is the realm of soul.

It means, of course, that when you don't know what to do, when you don't know whether your character would do this or that, you get quiet and try to hear that still small voice inside. It will tell you what to do.

was the day I knew the ingredients of the spiritual that would serve me—love, poetry, prayer, meditation

Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distraction...What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.

It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.

I feel a hunger now- a real hunger-for letting the pool still itself & seeing the reflections.

Charles Morgan describes as "the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still.

Plotinus was preaching the dangers of multiplicity of the world back in the third century.

Solitude, says the moon shell. Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day.

Here on the island I find I can sit with a friend without talking, sharing the day's last sliver of pale green light on the horizon, or the whorls in a small white shell, or the dark scar left in a dazzling night sky by a shooting star. Then communication becomes communion and one is nourished as one never is by words.

The problem is not entirely in finding a room of one's own, the time alone, difficult and necessary as that is. The problem is more how to still the soul in the midst of its activities. In fact, the problem is how to feed the soul.

A day out of season, stopping the monotonous count of summer days. Stopping, too, one's own summer routine, so that, looking out on the gray skies, one says not only, 'What time of year is it?' but, 'What time of life am I in? Where am I? What am I doing?

We must re-learn to be alone.

She has the world on a string, and she contemplates it with some satisfaction.

His Back was turned to the end of the world and the end of the world was quiet.

Sweet to think on it, that when we are last weary of all this world there is the rising sun