Quotes About Stillness

Another week passes into grey oblivion. You're a slow dream, an autumn freeze, a ship on the doldrums. Thoughts come slow and ponderous, like deep sea fish floating heavy and memory-bound to the surface; coelacanth reborn.

To smell mixed with the strong coffee the faint pleasant scent of cedar from the ceiling's wooden beams. To be quiet and still and have all thought be channeled into observing the lives of creatures that stirred only after Sam had gone to sleep. It felt, over time, like not just a distraction but being part of something that as yet required nothing from her.

The oaks stand - quite still - so still that the lichen loves them...such solace and solitude seventy-nine miles thick cannot be painted...it is necessary to stay in it like oaks to know it. (1884)

I thought of a line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, "As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.

The silence was so loud

Meditation, otherwise known as sitting still and thinking about nothing, is one of those things that can be just as stupidly simple as it is surprisingly hard.

A wise man once said nothing.

He pulled her close. "Your being with me makes it stop. It's like the Ming bowls - when I touch them and feel them, everything stops. You are the same. That is why I brought you here, to keep you with me, where you can please make...everything...stop.

Standing under the gray sky among so many women, Anna began to understand the collective grief: Lydia had been a last still point amid so much wrenching change.

I've always thought you should be able to freeze time. This way you could hit the Pause button at a really good point in your life so that nothing changes

In stillness I notice how time and space disappear. All there is is the present moment and my willingness to listen...to allow the stillness to speak-Eileen Fisher

Nothing could be more heart rending than this mute and motionless dispair

The house beneath slumbered in unbroken stillness. The silence filled his ears with a hum, which grew into a sound of whispering voices. Slowly and irresistibly these voices mastered him and increased the feeling of anxiety which had almost choked him several times that day. What could be the cause of such mental anguish? What could be the strange trouble which had slowly grown within him and had now become so unbearable? He had not fallen into sin.

Heathcliff, make the world stop right here. Make everything stop and stand still and never move again. Make the moors never change and you and I never change.

I think of love, and you, and my heart grows full and warm, and my breath stands still.

Our lives are Swiss, so still- so cool

If the stillness is Volcanic In the human face When upon a pain Titanic Features keep their place- If at length the smoldering anguish Will not overcome- And the palpitating Vinyard In the dust, be overthrown?

A Clock Stopped -- Not The Mantel's A clock stopped -- not the mantel's Geneva's farthest skill Can't put the puppet bowing That just now dangled still. An awe came on the trinket! The figures hunched with pain, Then quivered out of decimals Into degreeless noon. It will not stir for doctors, This pendulum of snow; The shopman importunes it, While cool, concernless No Nods from the gilded pointers, Nods from seconds slim, Decades of arrogance between The dial life and him.

The thought is quiet as a flake, —

Shadows hold their breath;

Each life converges to some centre expressed or still . . .

If such a little figure Slipped quiet from its chair

I heard a fly buzz when I died; The stillness round my form Was like the stillness in the air Between the heaves of storm.

death's stiff stare