Quotes About Contemplation

Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she'd spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she'd ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping?

Ho da poco scoperto che la mia amica Mary, quando finisce un libro, fa passare qualche giorno prima di cominciarne un altro - vuole dare all'ultima lettura un po' più di respiro, prima che venga soffocata dalla prossima. È una cosa sensata, e mi sembra una linea di comportamento assolutamente lodevole. Noi che leggiamo nevroticamente, tuttavia - per scongiurare la noia e il timore dell'ignoranza e della nostra morte imminente - non possiamo permetterci di farlo.

It was the absences that had made her think, not the presences.

Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take anymore, and then it's off to the nearest multistory car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.

I'm a writer. Life is supposed to pass me by, while I watch it.

I try not to believe in God, of course, but sometimes things happen in music, in songs, that bring me up short, make me do a double-take.

Because really, when you get down on your knees on the pew, you're just giving God a blow job.

She pressed her fingertips to the cold glass. Outside the night was beautiful but frozen. The trees were still as statues. Above the trees swung a little star, glittering in the deep dark of the night, sometimes obscured by the scurrying cloud, sometimes shining bright, growing in strength.

Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. It wasn't easy. I found out how little is unbearable.

That he liked to think of himself as a philosopher. That he questioned all things, even the most simple, to the extent that when someone passing him on the street raised his hat and said, 'Good day,' Litvinoff often paused so long to weigh evidence that by the time he'd settled on an answer the person had gone on his way, leaving him standing alone.

Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.

I often wonder who will be the last person to see me alive. If I had to bet, it would be on the delivery boy from the Chinese take-out. I order in four nights out of seven. Whenever he comes I make a big production of finding my wallet. He stands in the door holding the greasy bag while I wonder if this is the night I'll finish off my spring roll, climb into bed, and have a heart attack in my sleep.

There's no match for the silence of GOD.

Put even a fool in front of the window and you'll get a Spinoza; in the end life makes window watchers of us all

Metti chiunque, anche uno scemo, davanti a una finestra, e avrai uno Spinoza.

When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of the curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him he heard less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not.

Lonely people are always up in the middle of the night.

I thought: I didn't live forever.

Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. I lived. It wasn't easy. And yet. I found out how little is unbearable.

I tried to make sense of things. Now that I think about it, I have always tried. It could be my epitaph. LEO GURSKY: HE TRIED TO MAKE SENSE.

Somewhere in the far north of Canada there wuld be snow, falling soundlessly overy the Beaufort Sea, falling over the Artic without a soul to see it. What kind of weather was that, Samson wondered, and how was one to use this information except as proof that the world was too much to bear?

Then one day I was looking out the window. Maybe I was contemplating the sky. Put even a fool in front of the window and you'll get a Spinoza.

We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors - walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.

Only those thoughts which come from walking have any value