Quotes About Consciousness

this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

Y cuando volvió en sí, estaba echado de espaldas en una playa sobre la arena muy fría y caía la lluvia de un cielo bajo y la marea estaba lejana.

The only way you can communicate at a high level is to be conscious of everything you write — every comma, every pronoun, every word, and all their implications.

The German logician Kant was right in this respect, human beings are all pretty much identical in terms of our hardwiring. Although we are seldom conscious of it, we are all basically just instruments or expressions of our evolkutiuonary drives, which are themselves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more important than we are.

Some answer or trick of the will: the ability not to think about it. What if everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine?

Booboo, we've been over this. I can't be asleep if we're talking.

I was one of the men in this room, the only one wearing a wristwatch who never once glanced at it. What looked just like glasses were not. I was wired from stem to stern.

What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting.

Forever Overhead No time is passing outside you at all. It is amazing. The late ballet below is slow motion, the overbroad movements of mimes in blue jelly. If you wanted you could really stay here forever, vibrating inside so fast you float motionless in time, like a bee over something sweet.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race.

My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X.

Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back.

I'm not saying I'm able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

There seemed to be so many implications even to thinking about sitting up and standing up and exiting V.R.5 and taking a certain variable-according-to-stride-length number of steps to the stairwell door, on and on, that just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor.

Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes "it" the subject of the text. Minimalism's even worse, emptier, because it's a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any narrative personality at all, tries to pretend there "is" no narrative consciousness in its text. This is so fucking American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. -Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)

On one level my attention was intently focused on her voice and story. On another level I - it was if my mind was having a garage sale.

I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience.

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces. The

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace