Quotes About Awareness

I seem to be on a road, walking, greeting the hedgerows, the rose-hips, the apples and thorn. I seem to be on a road, walking, familiar with neighbors, high-handed with cattle, smelling the sea, and alone. Already, I know the names of things. I can kick a stone.

The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin's rim, of nations and wars. You wake one day and discover your grandmother; you wake another day and notice, like any curious naturalist, the boys.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.

We still & always want waking.

The silence is not suppression; instead, it is all there is.

Am I living?'...I forgot myself, and sank into dim and watery oblivion.

Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch the grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

He is careful of what he reads, for this is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, as this is what he will know.

Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture, and lapse into a dreamless sleep.

The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is (21).

it is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.

I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.

beauty and grace [in nature] are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.

No one knew that ordinary breakfast would be their last. Why not memorize everything, just in case?

The interior life is often stupid.

If she[…] had known how much her first half-inch beginning to let go would take - and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery whose end was nowhere in sight - would she have begun?

When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our sense.

Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this.

If a meteor falls in the forest and no one realizes it, does it end the war?

Some mornings when I wake up, it takes a long time to remember who I am. Like, it takes a while for everything that's happened in last month to download into my brain. It's nice, not knowing. Even if it's just for five minutes.

Maybe none of us know who we really are.