Quotes About Stillness

When I get nervous my energy gets really still, and I think people think that's me. Everything gets really still, and my voice gets a little bit lower and there is a little croak in there - sometimes you can hear it when I'm really nervous on camera.

My main hope for myself is to be where I am.

I used to have a theory about photographing. It was a sense of getting in between two actions, or in between acton and repose.

the Missus stood like a ghost.

I thought nothing. The surface of my mind was perfectly still. But under the surface there was a shifting and a stirring. I felt the great swell of the undercurrent. For years a wreck had sat in the depths, a rusting vessel with its cargo of bones. Now it shifted. I had disturbed it, and it created a turbulence that lifted clouds of sand from the seabed, motes of grit swirling wildly in the dark disturbed water.

Then nobody spoke, and they breathed the minutes in and out till they made an hour.

The cat was on the window ledge, gazing intently into the garden.

Rigid, glaring, set in a frown, his face was so much what it had been in life that the maid spoke to him three times before she realized he was dead.

I could hear rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed completely cut off from the restless day outside--just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.

As long as I live I shall remember that silent minute.

Abandonnez les offrandes d'encens, les prosternations, le nenbutsu, la pratique du repentir et la lecture des sutras : restez simplement assis (shikantaza).

That clean but lonely feeling when there are no other cars. The traffic lights changing just for you.

His stillness was commanding. I felt myself getting whiter by the second. What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in? I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched in my chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word and thing a beadwork of bright creation.

I felt the distance and stillness of that sprawled dawn like some endless sky waking inside me, flared against the laughter.

I got out of bed in the middle of the night and went to the small room at the end of the hall to watch Steffie and Wilder sleep. I remained at this task, motionless, for nearly an hour, feeling refreshed and expanded in unnameable ways.

The real voice is stiller and smaller and seems to know, without confusion, the difference between right and wrong and the subtle delineation between the beautiful and profane. It's not an agitated voice, but ever patient as though it approves a million false starts. The voice I am talking about is a deep water of calming wisdom.

She stood motionless like that for

There was no breeze, not the slightest current; the day lay like a filthy blanket upon the city.

She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty- a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room. Like a fashion drawing come to life, she turned heads wherever she went, gliding along obliviously without appearing to notice the turbulence she created in her wake.

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.

Outside, it was cool and still, the sky a hazy shade of white peculiar to autumn mornings...

She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty—a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.

At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head.

Era una quietud que yo conocía bien: así se encerraba en sí misma una casa cuando alguien moría.