Quotes About Awareness

I was so unaccustomed to such emotions it took some time before I realized I was happy.

What looked empty was full, much like water in a cup. What was most important was invisible to the eye.

We know what we need when we get it, Brock Stewart had once said. Elinor understood this to be true whenever she heard Jenny in the hallway, when she looked up from her work in the garden to see a light burning in the kitchen. She knew it when the kettle on the back burner of the stove whistled, when the back door opened and shut, when the house she lived in wasn't empty. She hadn't understood how alone she'd been until she was no longer alone. She had cut herself off...

I had been blind to the pain of others until I had my own burden to carry.

You don't need wealth to appreciate something beautiful.

Even when you kept your eyes wide open, the world would surprise you.

Somehow, what they'd had was already over, and she hadn't even been aware of the end. This happened with roses: it was possible to take them for granted all summer as they wound along fences and gates, and then in September, when they faded, how beautiful they'd once been suddenly took hold. That was when people began to yearn for them, and all winter long they'd watch the bare branches for buds, vowing that this time they'd be grateful for all that they had.

It was a warm and breezy day, too warm for Sally's heavy clothes, so she draped her coat over her arm. The sun went through the fabric of her dress, a hot hand across flesh and bones. Sally felt as though she'd been dead and now that she was back she was particularly sensitive to the world of the living: the touch of the wind against her skin, the gnats in the air, the scent of mud and new leaves, the sweetness of blues and greens.

It was so much easier to see another person's future than it was to understand your own. Even when you kept your eyes wide open, the world would surprise you.

Elinor would have surely ignored them, such was her habit and her inclination, even though she knew whenever someone ignored what hurt her most, she'd wind up in grave circumstances. Ignore love, she now understood, and a person might bleed forever, even if no one could tell.

You think terrible things can't happen because they've never happened to you, but they're out there, all the time, every day. They happen to someone.

Some things, however, are true no matter how hard you might try to block them out and a lie is always a lie no matter how prettily told.

When she'd been married she had been to busy to notice that the world was beautiful. Or perhaps she'd known and had forgotten.

I thought perhaps it was more important to listen than to be heard.

Close your eyes and listen, then walk twenty paces farther than you thought necessary. Just when you're certain you've lost your way completely, you'll be there. Open your eyes.

He kept thinking about the life span of a mayfly, and all the time he had wasted, and frankly he wasn't willing to waste any more.

what she misses most is someone knowing she's alive

Some people believe that if you don't open your eyes to sorrow and you don't talk about it, you can pretend it never happened.

don't read. It's a waste of time. It's just for people who want to escape real life.

There was so much light in the world we knew we would never be able to count it all.

Love happens in such a way, Maureen told me. It walks up to you, and when it does, you need to recognize it for what it is and, perhaps more important, for what it might become.

Once you knew that death was walking alongside you, things came into focus, as they now did for Jet. With only seven days left she had best pay attention to every detail. She had already taken note that the lines on her right palm, showing the fate that she'd been given, and those on the left hand, the fate she had made for herself, were exactly the same; they had converged, as they always do at the end of a life.

A person got to really see things if she wasn't racing through life

Close your eyes and listen, such people advised, then walk twenty paces farther than you thought necessary. Just when you're certain you've lost your way completely, you'll be there. Open your eyes.