Quotes About Contemplation

art is a meditation upon external reality rather than a representation of external reality

It's only when you stop to think about it. I don't stop. - From Morning

I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

Six billion people live in this world, and I can only muster thoughts for one. Me.

When the credits roll, we wonder what we did with our lives, and what was the meaning.

external, internal, and philosophical problems.

I understand why people wear crystals around their necks and why they perform chants and gaze at stars. They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny little people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars. And it's not like God has a call-in radio show.

If you're going to have an existential crisis, Portland in winter is hard to beat.

we have to stop blasting them with noise.

The thing about trying to remember your life is it makes you wonder what any of it means. You get the feeling life means something, but you're not sure what. Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it.

he could just tabulate all the hours he'd spent talking about politics and politicians during his life and could pack them together like a snowball and somehow add them to his life, how much longer would he live? Even more interesting, how else might he have used that time? He could have learned another language; to knit and have made sweaters or long, uneven scarves for everyone. What colour Judo belt would he be entitled to wear by now?

Brunetti watched Cesco trying to decide whether to say something else, so he made himself look as much like an oak tree as possible: patient, motionless, secure.

She stood motionless like that for

The Cloud of Unknowing.

He realized how primitive this feeling was but, as a friend of his father had often said, he had only one head, so he had only one way to think about things.

All those layers of silence upon silence.

Are you always up this early?' I asked him. 'Almost always,' he said without looking up. 'It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.

But though it was the most resonant and real-seeming thing that had happened in a long time, I didn't want to spoil it by talking about it...

I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost's, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark.

I waited for him to pick up the thread again—and when he didn't, we sat there peacefully, while I sipped my cooling tea (Lapsang Souchong, smoky and peculiar) and felt the strangeness of my life, and where I was.

But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.

I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greak. ?????? ?? ????. Beauty is harsh. ? Donna Tartt, The Secret History

a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.