Quotes About Consciousness

The world is idea.

The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.

She knew very well that she knew very well that she knew very well.

If you're happy in a dream…does that count? The happiness–does it count?

Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl.

She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know. How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated.

She could hear her hair growing.

If you're happy in a dream, does that count? The happiness - does it count?

The harbinger of harsh reality:

She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know.

She wondered how to un-know certain things

They denounced him for his "Parliamentary Cretinism" and accused him of "providing relief to the people and thereby blunting the People's Consciousness and diverting them from the Revolution.

People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.

Somewhere in my mind, I must have been aware of the possibility that

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present.

But the Black male consciousness must be raised to the realization that sexism and woman-hating are critically dysfunctional to his liberation as a Black man because they arise out of the same constellation that engenders racism and homophobia.

I respect the time I spend each day treating my body, and I consider it part of my political work. It is possible to have some conscious input into our physical processes–not expecting the impossible, but allowing for the unexpected–a kind of training in self-love and physical resistance.

One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness. When I develop that sense of awareness, I develop, by extension, a sense concerning you. That does not dictate why my relationship is with you. I may have to fight you, but as soon as I am aware of you, I must relate to you. I must take you in. This is engagement. It is a prerequisite to any kind of love, and it is difficult and necessary.

That we were dying, that we were killing our world - that sense had always been with me. That whatever I was doing, whatever we were doing that was creative and right, functioned to hold us from going over the edge. That was the most we could do while we constructed some saner future.

I feel, therefore I can be free.

As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change.

Sometimes despair sweeps across my consciousness like luna winds across a barren moonscape. Ironshod horses rage back and forth over every nerve.

Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present.