Quotes About Contemplation

Maharet put her arm around Mekare's waist, and Mekare, come from brutal isolation I know not where, merely stared into space as though she knew some quiet peace but no more than that.

The striking thing about death, she thought, was its eventfulness. It made you see you were leading a real life. Real life at last! you could say. Was that why she read the obituaries each morning, hunting familiar names? Was that why she carried on those hushed, awed conversations with the other workers when one of the nursing home patients was carted away in a hearse?

Now, when you sit, your blood sort of sits along with you. It don't go rushing around your brain no more. Consequently, it takes that much more time to get rid of some sad idea in your mind. The process is slowed considerable. Whereas if you hurry your blood up some Ã¢â'¬Â¦ There is a sizable amount of people could benefit from what I know.

Does he ever stop to consider his life? The meaning of it, the point? Does it trouble him to think that he will probably spend his next thirty or forty years this way? Nobody knows. And it's almost certain nobody's ever asked him. On a Monday toward the end of October, he was still eating breakfast when his first call came in.

Why! he always thought to himself. What was that little redhead doing by the side of

The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.

But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out.

I seem to be on a road, walking, greeting the hedgerows, the rose-hips, the apples and thorn. I seem to be on a road, walking, familiar with neighbors, high-handed with cattle, smelling the sea, and alone. Already, I know the names of things. I can kick a stone.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

The silence is not suppression; instead, it is all there is.

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany.

it is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.

How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.

The interior life is often stupid.

Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars themselves neither require nor demand it.

You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.

She imagines herself as the long-dead Descartes, staring into his fireplace and building a world in his own mind.

She started spending more time looking out the window than at her own reflection, as is often the case with troublesome girls.

I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never end up here, either.

I will think of you every day. All the time. If ever you should think of me and wonder what I'm doing, I'm thinking of you. That's all I'll be doing. Nothing else.

At any time and in any place I find moonlight very moving.