Quotes About Awareness

Julian Thompson

Part of the post-apocalyptic, dystopian trend is that it seems to go hand in hand with young adult novels. Maybe that's because it's not simply the adults who are aware of the current crisis. Teens are the ones who are being told, again and again, that their futures are in jeopardy. The teen years can feel dystopian even in the best of times. But I don't think we realize how much pressure and feeling of doom we're passing down to our teens.

When boys grow into men, their boyishness is still apparent each time they abandon themselves a little. I stretch against them sometimes--lovesickness, it is the same ache as homesickness for me--and I marvel. The length of their bodies, it's where I find my house, my old street, Ashbury Park and all of its yowling--men, they walk around carrying my country, my motherland, and they don't even know. They don't have the tiniest idea.

Are you saying that the people here aren't desperate? I think you're wrong. I think they are and they just don't know it. Oh, they're desperate, all right, but so desperate that they're clinging to what they have.

I am who I am at any given moment…. That's the only way you can know me.

Have you noticed how nobody ever looks up? Nobody looks at chimneys, or trees against the sky, or the tops of buildings. Everybody just looks down at the pavement or their shoes. The whole world could pass them by and most people wouldn't notice. Julie Andrews Edwards

Oh, God," he said softly to himself. "I knew you were trouble.

He was all too aware of the failings of his species and he knew how to use them to his advantage. A fascinating skill. A useful one. But hardly a loving one.

talking to him this morning had been like taking that first bite of an orange. That first sip of black, black coffee. He listened as though she mattered precisely as much as he did. How disorienting this quality was to encounter in a man.

When she pulled it out, something tum- bled out along with it: a soft copper lock of her own hair. She went blank for a moment, thrown oddly off bal ance. The things lined up neatly on the floor in front of her were like words to a sentence in a language she had only begun learning, a sentence punctuated poignantly by a copper curl. They told a story Rebecca sensed she already half knew, she could feel it radiating, increasing in light, on the far reaches of her awareness.

the brightening he detected in the room around him might just be the whites of dozens of eyes as they widened [upon him]

the biggest lie people tell themselves is that they prefer to know the truth.

Living in the Moment

The surgical nurses were right. Theo Buchanan was gorgeous.. and sexy as hell. But none of that should matter. She was his physician, nothing more, nothing less.. His hair was sticking up and he needed a shave, but he was still sexy. There wasn't anything wrong with her noticing that.. unless, of course, he noticed her noticing.

Knowledge is freedom and with freedom comes understanding.

Family," she whispered. "So many people go through their lives with blinders on. They become self-involved and only want to think about their wants and their desires. They don't leave room for anything else, and then, too late, they realize how important their families were.

At times, circumstances conspire to make us believe the lies we tell ourselves. Everything- the weather, the season, the fall of light- sets the stage for our play; we find ourselves, instead of acting, becoming the characters, moving into a reality in which we're inseparable from our roles.

Surely there must be something they had said, or done, surely there must be some mistake they had made, surely they must be guilty of something, some obscure crime, perhaps, of which they were not even aware.

I followed their gaze to a plug of a woman, her head of salt-and-pepper hair shorn into the sort of crew cut they give to the mentally disabled, who had plopped down on the concrete irectly behind me.

Something about knowing exactly what you're doing, and why.

But then, if you forget what's bad, cruel, unjust, you might not care anymore about setting things to rights. You might stop standing up against the folk who do evil deeds. And someone's got to.

If you forget what's bad, cruel, unjust, you might not care anymore about setting things to rights. You might stop standing up against the folk who do evil deeds. And someone's got to.

Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is 'open-minded' and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.

To know, according to Wisdom, does not mean "to think", but to be the thing known: to live it, to realise it inwardly. One does not really know a thing unless one can actively transform one's consciousness into it.