Quotes About Contemplation

A yellow leaf fluttered down from overhead and settled in his lap, a clear, almost transparent yellow against the brownness of the robe. He moved to brush it off and then he let it stay. For who am I, he thought, to interfere with or dispute even such a simple thing as the falling of a leaf. He

We have fallen on hard times of the spirit, with many of the people more concerned with fear of evil than contemplation of the good.

though she hurried him on, he dawdled, his head back, squinting at the stars. There were no revelations to be had there. Just pinpricks of light in a plain heaven. But he saw for the first time how fine that was. That in a world too full of loss and rage they be remote: the minimum of glory. As she led him across the lightless ground, time and again he could not prevent his gaze from straying skyward.

Finally, slowly, like a newly lighted oil lamp gathering kerosene up into its wick, Wally's face began to glow. He turned to Mack Fulton. "Mack, you know what's on my mind?

Is that the moral of it all, he thought? the moral of the whole story: that there is time enough for everything? Is that how morals come, unbidden, in the course of events, when you least expect them?

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.

look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you...

Alison was snoring gently, and I was thinking about what would happen if I pinched her nose. And covered her mouth. The head is so full of holes, and the ear, nose and throat are supposedly connected; you would wonder why it isn't possible to breathe through your ears.

Alas, the day comes of the most contemptible man who can no longer condemn himself.... Then the earth will have grown small, and upon it shall hop the Last Man who makes all things small; his kind is inexterminable, like the ground flea. The last man lives longest.

His legs remembered the correct position for squatting down with toys. He played. He fit the round male studs into the round female grooves. He got some thinking done as he hunkered down on his fallen-sleep legs.

scattered parkgoers. Cora hunkered and

Things are happening too fast for her to convince herself that she does not need time to think, to get to the bottom of things.

A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain. Of committing to a course of action.

This slow debate about the rain: it's not about rain at all, but the fragility of what we know. We're all just guessing.

He realized that he had thought only about the first step, never imagined the last.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

The quiet lines matter as much as the noisy ones.

You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it!

The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.

Their reflection in the glass. The water behind them stretched distant and black. I stood in the doorway a long, long time, unsure of what to do or say. I wasn't interested in their

One corner to another. One more crack in the pavement. That's the way we all walk: the more we have to occupy our minds the better.

The mind is a garden, said he.

Very quiet and yet quieter living-for-ourselves.