Quotes About Awareness

He had never seen anything die before and so, he could not be certain that she was dying. And yet, somewhere deep inside himself, he felt a recognition and then a reckoning: this was death, and he would die, and his mother would die, and everyone you ever met and ever loved would die, and maybe it would happen when you or they were old, but maybe not. To know this was unbearable: it was a fact too large for a nine-year-old avatar to contain.

How many times can you look at something and know that everyone around you is seeing the same thing or at the very least that their brains and eyes are responding to the same phenomenon? How much proof do you ever have that we're all in the same world?

It is lucky, she thinks, that we don't feel all the love inside us every moment.

phenomenological

And yet, in K-town, he felt more Korean than he ever had before. Or to put a finer point on it, he felt more aware of the fact that he was a Korean and that that was not necessarily a negative or even a neutral fact about him. The awareness gave him pause: perhaps a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist at the center of the world, not just on its periphery.

This is what time travel is. It's looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently.

1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken.

Most of the time, Sam did not experience himself as disabled, but the cobblestones, the ice, and the glacial pace at which he had to negotiate them suggested otherwise.

It was only when he was alone and he couldn't participate in the business of living that he tended to notice how lovely being alive was.

There's a difference between being alive and living

The world had always looked painfully beautiful to him when he was sick. It was only when he was alone and he couldn't participate in the business of living that he tended to notice how lovely being alive was.

This is what time travel is. It's looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently

You are dying. No, that came out wrong. What you meant to express was the existential grief that comes with the knowledge that all things die. You are not dying, except insofar as you have always been dying.

Just because something is a small problem doesn't mean it shouldn't be addressed. Small injustices conceal larger ones" -Anya

There would be leaves in the fall, and snow in the winter, and cherry blossoms in the spring. The world had always looked painfully beautiful to him when he was sick. It was only when he was alone and he couldn't participate in the business of living that he tended to notice how lovely being alive was.

Until Harvard, he had not realized that in America—and not just in its college theaters—there were only so many roles an Asian could play.

Why was it acceptable for apparently well-meaning people to see the world in such a general way?

The work was the thing that lasted, but the work only lasted if people knew it existed.

Come on, Sadie. There'll always be another class. How many times can you look at something and know that everyone around you is seeing the same thing or at the very least that their brains and eyes are responding to the same phenomenon? How much proof do you ever have that we're all in the same world?

This is what time travel is. It's looking at a person and seeing them in the present and past, concurrently.

Every day, there is less of me. Today I am thoughts without words. Tomorrow I will be a body without thoughts. And so it goes.

And maybe some of those people will pause before they say gaydar." "They'll pause and say, 'Now I know this isn't PC . . .' and then, they'll say it anyway," Archie says.

The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything

The store is seven Mayas wide and twelve Mayas long. She knows this because she once spent an afternoon measuring it by lying her body across the room. It is fortunate that it is not more than twenty Mayas long because that is as far as she could count on the day the measurements were taken.