Quotes About Reflection

An old man, I want only peace. The things of this world mean nothing. I know no good way to live and I can't stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt. The mountain moon lights me as I play my lute.

Listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends.

Watching the man, hard-of-hearing, hard-of-speech Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

And you, fallen Wendy, eviscerated by the eternal recurrence of it all, hear Peter snarl at you for growing guilty and big and old...

He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere

She sat on her porch those first nights, wrapped in the brackish tidal air. The future's breeze split across her face and joined up again behind her. She felt herself a spinster whose sudden new suitor must be either sadistic, blind, or a confused fortune hunter. She'd read all the cautionary fairy tales and knew the one inevitable outcome. Still, she consented to this courtship, and even decided to court it back.

I remain one of those unreformable suckers who want to hear, just hear from time to time, even if the point of hearing has long since disappeared.

Life has a way of talking to the future. It's called memory.

It was like so, but wasn't.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

Life became an interruption of my description of it.

memory is always a collaboration in progress.

Life is something we need to stop correcting.

Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise.

Smart enough to see that you're a sack of rotting meat wrapped around a little sewage tube that's going to give out in—what? Another few thousand sunrises?

The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. MAY WE NOT SEE GOD?

What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer...

If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a

She lies awake at night, staring upward, remembering being right next to the only discovery that matters. Life was whispering instructions to her, and she failed to write them down.

That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life.

The pen moves; the ideas form, as if by spirit hand. Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you're by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

He covers his closed eyes with one hand and says, I'm sorry. No forgiveness comes, or ever will. But here's the thing about trees, the greatest thing: even when he can't see them, even when he can't get near, even when he can't remember how they go, he can climb, and they will hold him high above the ground and let him look out over the arc of the Earth.