Quotes About Contemplation

She thrust her hands in her pockets and turned her snakestone over and over. She found it helped her think.

I stood there for a long time after he bumped his way over the turf and down the track, until the smell of his exhaust had faded into the trees and soil, and I could hear nothing but the buds. The air smelled like rain.

Hild stared at him, her mind smooth as wax.

Whatever she did she would find herself thinking of people who weren't there.

She let the ebb and flow of the hall wash over her, much as she sometimes sat behind bracken at the edge of a clearing or reeds by the edge of a pool.

We sat silently, contemplating the ghosts we had created between us, and the difference between our world and that of most people.

She mused on the words and beads for days but couldn't see the pattern.

She could pretend it was enough to sit with a tablet weave between them, as women had for generations, and sometimes talk, sometimes fall into a half trance, mind floating free.

Silence while we both thought our thoughts.

She walked in the evening through her domaine, as aware of it as if her own body.

Hild wasn't listening. He wondered what paths she walked in her head.

Hild stepped forward so the moon caught her face, thin and pale.

One had to sit still and really quiet to really see, really hear.

Quiet mouth, bright mind.

She could no more stop thinking than stop breathing.

She looked at me with the same concentration she had directed at the painting. I felt her gaze on the bones, the cant of my eyebrows; weighing the line of jaw and length of neck; noting colour and shadow.

I wandered, paying no particular attention, just absorbing the city through the soles of my shoes and the taste on my tongue.

She closed her eyes, willing her vision to rise from the blood-spattered green mountainside.

She had no idea what path her mother's thoughts might be taking.

She withdrew to the shadows and began the long walk back under a twist of stars.

Hild slipped away to sit in the moon shadow of a tufted dune with the sheathed knife in her lap and listen to the night breeze in the grass and think about nothing in particular.

How impossibly untangleable is the tangle of what ifs.

To live with lucidity a simple, quiet, discreet life among intelligent books, loving a few beings.

Only he lives his life who observes it, thinks it, and says it; the rest let life live them.