Quotes About Reflection

She stands with her nose in the bark, perversely intimate. She doses herself for a long time, like a hospice patient self-administering morphine. Chemicals rush down her windpipe, through the bloodstream to her body's provinces across the blood-brain barrier and into her thoughts. The smell grips her brain stem until she and the dead man are fishing side by side again, under the pine shade where the fish hide, in the soul's innermost national park.

people see better what looks like them.

palindrome: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.

he reads the same paragraph a dozen times; the words turn into twirling things, like winged seeds spinning in the air.

We only see things that look like us.

Six different kinds of forest all around us. Seventeen hundred flowering plants. More tree species than in all of Europe. Thirty kinds of salamander, for God's sake. Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head. Above us, a raven the size of an Oz winged monkey flew up into a white pine.

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

The past tries to kill her—all the people they were or had hoped to be.

The people inside these changed lives differ from us only in degree. Each of us has inhabited these baffling islands, if only briefly.

Does it bother you, to be such a destroyer of productivity?" Neelay gazes out on a patch of mountain shaved bare half a century ago. "I don't think . . . It might not be so bad, to destroy a little productivity.

Best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago." "Yep. And you always said the next best time was now." "Wrong. Next best time, nineteen years ago.

And then the words that would never weaken and never go away: Can you believe where we are?

That's when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment.

In the dark, she asks, What are you thinking? He's thinking that his life has reached its zenith, this very day. That he has lived to see everything he wants. Lived to see himself happy.

There's a whole lot of comfort in saying nothing.

People, God love 'em, must write all over beeches. But some people—some fathers—are written all over by trees.

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.

Quédate quieto. Espera. Algo en el solitario superviviente sabe que se puede resistir más allá de la irrefutable ley del Ahora.

For the bitch I was. For the attentive person I wasn't.

it. There is great, joyous, and essential work to do. But first a person needs to graduate from endless self-love.

Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in.

Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

listen to what other people called silence

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.