Quotes About Contemplation

She is finished eating dinner, halfway through the fiftysome pages of the novella, considering a rare third glass of wine

They sat side by side, their legs drawn up, arms around their knees, facing west toward the Far East, where Japan lay thousands of miles away in tomorrow afternoon.

Sure, I can turn on the TV or music, but even then I can't turn off the quiet, the emptiness.

Prim and proper, a cat woman . . .Hmm, I was left to wonder. Possibly a librarian in her late forties or early fifties. In town for a special occasion? It certainly left me to ponder her story.

Autumn arrived and life was in danger of becoming boring again.

He got right down in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn't going to come. That's it. That's the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.

Like all men you have a religion - at least a way of looking at yourself and the universe both at once, which is all I'd hope a religion to be...

As he expressed these ideas he followed them with his eyes, watching them gallop away to the place where they made sense.

She was resting at a table between numbers in the Greek nightclub where she was dancing. A little of the stage light touched her. She was very frail. She seemed to be thinking about something far away, waiting patiently for somebody to destroy her.

I stayed in the library, crushed breathless by the smoldering power of all those words – many of them unfathomable – until Happy Hour. And then I left.

I know there are people who believe that wherever you look, all you see is yourself. Episodes like this make me wonder it they aren't right. Dirty Wedding

Staring at his own face reflected in a cup of bitter karma. For

read until his focus loosened and the lines of text divided into duplicates and floated on the page.

searched for reasons not to blow my brains out. I came up with two or three dozen real fast, but I still wasn't certain I could listen to many more conversations between Brandon and one of his "bras.

Most people wait until tragedy strikes before thinking about how to incorporate tragedy into their life.

Human beings have a tremendous need to have quiet time alone, to reflect upon life and reconnect with the soul.

Please go out and find a stone that appeals to you on some level. It can be beautiful or ugly. It shouldn't be a pebble, nor should it be a boulder. Find a stone with some weight to it. It should be small enough to carry in the palm of your hand and large enough that you won't lose it. Note in your journal exactly where you found the stone and what it was about the stone that appealed to you. Welcome. You have begun to walk the Fourfold Path.

I put back my head, looking up at the deep black sky swimming with hot stars. If you knew they were really balls of flaming gas, you could imagine them as Van Gogh saw them, without difficulty . . . and looking into that illuminated void, you understood why people have always looked up into the sky when talking to God. You need to feel the immensity of something very much bigger than yourself, and there it is - immeasurably vast, and always near at hand. Covering you.

Perhaps it was only that the sense of reaching out to something larger than yourself gives you some feeling that there is something larger - and there really has to be, because plainly you aren't sufficient to the situation.

Claire knew the flavor of solitude. It was cold as spring water, and not all could drink it; for some it was not refreshment, but mortal chill.

Fraser stood quite still for a moment, breathing slowly and regarding Woodbine as a tiger might regard a hedgehog: yes, he could eat it, but would the inconvenience of swallowing be worth it?

It was in a way a comforting idea; if there was all the time in the world, then the happenings of a given moment became less important. I could see, perhaps, how one could draw back a little, seek some respite in the contemplation of an endless Being, whatever one conceived its nature to be.

He stood for a moment, bereavement a sudden, small tear in his soul.

I hadn't spent so much time in bemused contemplation of a penis since I was sixteen or so, and here I was, preoccupied with three of the things.