Quotes About Awareness

Her life had not been long enough for her to know the whole of herself, it had not been long enough or wide.

Tinhas ar de quem não precisava de ninguém, disse ela. Mas são esses os que mais precisam, retorquiu ele. Então não sabes disso? Agora já sei, disse ela. Tarde de mais. O saber nunca vem tarde de mais!, exclamou ele. Talvez não, respondeu ela. Mas pode vir tarde de mais para nos servir para alguma coisa.

A free spirit's just an idiot who doesn't want to face reality.

Later she would learn that a mistrust of one's senses was a normal reaction to situations like this. Though the body is alerted and absolutely certain about what is happening, the brain might try to find a way to reason out of it. Was there a word for disbelief in one's own sense.

She rolled herself back so she wouldn't leave anything out. Sometimes time spread out like ink in water but it also had an order and one thing could not come without the other coming first.

I keep driving, slowly, hoping I'll remember where I'm going before I get there. So far I always have. Zen

I have learned some things about pain through my sitting practice. If I move to adjust my posture prematurely, the pain will chase me wherever I go, but if I just sit still when the pain starts, it often goes away, or recedes into the background.

There are pragmatic as well as moral grounds for the United States to follow Germany's lead [in dealing with it's past human rights crimes]. American media may have largely ignored the reasons we decided to destroy Hiroshima or oust the democratically elected governments in Iran or the Congo. Other nations' media has not. Few Americans are quite aware of how little credibility we retain in other parts of the world.

Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way it should be, while never losing sight of the way it is, is what being a grown-upmcomes to.

Clearly the students had been learning about racism—far away, and in another country

While systematic racism infects processes and affects lives all over America, Southern awareness of history makes it impossible to ignore. Moreover, the influence of the South on American political culture is disproportionate to the size of the region. Focusing on the Deep South is not a matter of ignoring the rest of the country, but

His mother claims she didn't know anything about the racist terror going on in Mississippi and Alabama; she was caught up in joining a sorority, not knowing what was going on in the rest of the world. Or around the corner.

Public memory: what every half-educated member of a culture knows in her sinews, for it seeped into them in ways she can hardly remember.

The focus on Auschwitz is a form of displacement for what we don't want to know about our own national crimes.

Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way that it should be, while never losing sight of the way that it is, is what being a grown-up comes to.

You can learn that no country, no culture, no religion is immune to falling into the abyss into which we fell. And once it begins, there will always be people who shut down their consciences and side with the strongman. Knowing that, we need to develop a kind of preventative uncertainty.

What can other countries learn from the German experience? "To look at your own country as if it were a foreign one. It's crucial to have a broken relationship to your past, to be ready to see your own history with shame and horror.

If you invite representative voices, shouldn't you listen to them, even when their claims are at odds with what you want to believe? West German beliefs about East Germany are so tenacious that the subjects of concern went unheard. In America, when white people tell black people how to feel about their own history, it's called whitesplaining. There isn't a word for it in German.

Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but there are a few things I wish I didn't know.

Sometimes it's harder to notice a place you think you know well; you eyes glide over it, seeing it but not seeing it at all. It's almost as if familiarity gives you a kind of temporary blindness. I had to force myself to look harder and try to see beyond the concept of library that was so latent in my brain.

Sometimes it's harder to notice a place you think you know well; your eyes glide over it, seeing it but not seeing it at all. It's almost as if familiarity gives you a kind of temporary blindness.

scientists have determined that staring at a smartphone screen for a long period of time induces a form of hypnosis).

Compassion occurs when we open our feelings to the feelings of another person, without judgement, pity, or a need to fix. It is an act of holding the fullness of feelings of another in our awareness and feeling suffering or joy with him or her; without becoming lost in the feeling.

Deep, quiet listening is a great gift.