Quotes About Awareness

Henri Bergson writes that humor is godless and entirely human since humor runs counter to the sublime: instead of transcending, you are made acutely aware of the skin in which you exist.

To live an ethical life is to be held accountable for history.

Innocence is, as Bernstein writes, not just an "absence of knowledge" but "an active state of repelling knowledge," embroiled in the statement, "Well, I don't see race" where I eclipses the seeing. Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.

For to be aware of history, they would be forced to be held accountable. And rather than face that shame, they'd rather, by any means necessary, maintain their innocence.

Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining.

A now-classic book that explores minor feelings is Claudia Rankine's Citizen. After hearing a racist remark, the speaker asks herself, What did you say? She saw what she saw, she heard what she heard, but after her reality has been belittled so many times, she begins to doubt her very own senses.

Alcoff calls this self-examination "white double-consciousness," which involves seeing "themselves through both the dominant and the nondominant lens, and recognizing the latter as a critical corrective truth." But

Shame is often associated with Asianness and the Confucian system of honor alongside its incomprehensible rites of shame, but that is not the shame I'm talking about. My shame is not cultural but political. It is being painfully aware of the power dynamic that pulls at the levers of social interactions and the cringing indignity of where I am in that order either as the afflicted—or as the afflicter.

When I was growing up, black and brown kids were casually racist. Korean kids were casually racist.

Life has little bits of magic at nearly every turn, if you're looking closely enough. Scrapbooking has refined myselses. it's made me hungry to use it before I lose it. It's made me remember that I don't remember what it was like to be nine years old. And that I will never live in a Pottery Barn house. And that as tiny as I am in the scope of the universe, no one lives a life like mine. Not even the people whose meals I cook, whose laundry I fold, and whose cheeks I kiss at night.

I'm… having one of those honeyed afternoons when I don't know who I am.

Sometimes, people can go missing right before our very eyes.Sometimes, people can discover you, even though they've been looking at you the entire time. Sometimes, we lose sight of ourselves when we're not paying enough attention.

Often when we realize how precious those seconds are, it's too late for them to be captured because the moment has passed. We realize too late.

Is it even our fight? As a mental test, I always try to reverse the gender. If some ninety million little boys were having their penises amputated, would the world have acted to prevent it by now? You bet.

He slowed his runner's stride so as not to overtake her.

the horse looks, but how beautiful it feels to him.

trouble is, these people don't understand their own culture," said

How the more you looked, the more you gleaned. All the 'ways of seeing' that John Berger wrote about.

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. It is not as if, had you asked me, I would have claimed to fathom the thoughts and sentiments of two whose station in life was so far distant from mine. But in my own unexamined way I had believed that, working in their house and seeing to their needs, watching their comings and goings and their dealings with others, I had come to know them. How little, how very little, that knowledge had really amounted to.

It's so easy for people like me"—a diplomat's son raised abroad and educated in America—"to be totally off base about this country and what it is ready to accept.

He came to believe that horses lived with a world of fear, and when you grasped that, you had a clear idea how to be with

He was not afraid of silence, which most of us will rush to fill.

can see what others cannot see, but sometimes I miss what is apparent to the dimmest simpleton.

I suppose the answer was that if something can be known, I can't stand not knowing it.