Quotes About Consciousness

It depends on which reality you take and which reality I take." (p. 318).

With my own hands, I had to construct this thing I called 'I' –or, rather, make the things that constituted me.

When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?

Nothingness means there's absolutely nothing, so maybe there's no need to understand it or imagine it.

Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct.

The most frightening thing in the world is our own self.

At the same time that 'I' am the content of a relation, 'I' am also that which does the relating.

I am me and not me.

One by one, with my own hands, I had to make this thing I called 'I'-- or, rather, make the things that constituted me.

We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts.

I wake up, but where? I don't just think this, I actually voice the question to myself: Where am I? As if I didn't know: I'm here. In my life. A feature of the world that is my existence.

I have to somehow get connected to reality again, he thought, or else I won't be me anymore. I'll become a man who doesn't exist.

Waves of consciousness roll in, roll out, leave some writing, and just as quickly new waves roll in and erase it. I try to quickly read what's written there, but it's hard.

He calmed himself, shut his eyes, and fell asleep. The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train of the night, began to fade into the distance, gradually speeding up, growing smaller until it was, finally, sucked into the depths of night, where it disappeared. All that remained was the sound of the wind slipping through a stand of white birch trees.

Subject and object are not as distinct as most people think. If the boundary separating the two isn't clear-cut to begin with, it is not such a difficult task to intentionally shift back and forth from one to the other.

I turn a corner, I offered, just as someone ahead of me turns the next corner. I can't see what that person looks like. All I can make out is a flash of white coattails. But the whiteness of the coattails is indelibly etched in my consciousness. Ever get that feeling?

I don't know how to put it, but I just can't get it through my head that here and now is really here and now. Or that I am really me. It doesn't quite hit home. It's always this way. Only much later on does it ever come together. For the last ten years, it's been like this.

As he watched his father, Tengo started to have doubts about the difference between a person being alive and being dead. Maybe there really wasn't much of a difference to begin with, he though, maybe we just decided, for convenience's sake, to insist on a difference.

To tell the truth, I do not know this thing called 'mind,' what it does or how to use it. It is only a word I have heard." "The mind is nothing you use," I say. "The mind is just there. It is like the wind. You simply feel its movements.

I hear things. Not sounds, but thick slabs of silence being dragged through the dark.

The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I'm in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness.

Trying to avoid a thought can make it more active in your brain.

The pigs were pushing their noses through the slats in the truck bed, which made Langston so unaccountably sad she thought she would have to sit down on the sidewalk. How is it possible, she thought, that a person can drive a thinking, feeling, animal to slaughter and not become less than an animal himself? And what were the pigs searching for, after all, but air and freedom?

But you can't ever live in the place you dream about, the town you long for. You can't go there, and I don't mean like Thomas Wolfe or whatever, I mean the moment you become conscious of your desire, and then fulfill it, it evaporates.