Quotes About Awareness

The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.

Our Children no longer learn how to read the great book of Nature from their own direct experience, or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water come from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.

He stands under them, looks up, sees, knows, and knows that he does not know.

There should be no relenting in our efforts to influence politics and politicians. But in the name of honesty and sanity we must recognize the limits of politics.

One morning when he was about thirteen, Den and I were in the barn doing the before-breakfast chores. I was in the milking stall, Den in the driveway. He must have been thinking about Maury, for after a while he said, Dad, Maury Telleen is not very tall. Did you ever notice that? Yes, I said. And probably I was about to tell him he should mind his manners, but he wasn't finished. He said, But you never think of him as a little man. Did you ever notice that? Yes, I said. I have noticed that.

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up from the pages of books and from your own heart. Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields. There are songs and sayings that belong to this place, by which it speaks for itself and no other.

White people who wished to think well of themselves did not use the language of racial insult in front of black people. But the problem for us white people, as we finally had to understand, was that we could not be selectively complicit. To be complicit at all, even thoughtlessly by custom, was to be complicit in the whole extent and reach of the injustice. It is hard for customary indifference to utstick itself from the abominations to which it tacitly consents.

There is time, and then there is timelessness. And if you're lucky, and if you can be still enough, observant enough, you may be able to know and speak about that intersection of time and timelessness, or time and eternity.

He has come into a wakefulness as quiet as sleep.

I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here.

We stood and looked and knowed it was all the time we had and from now on we must remember. We must look now forever.

He would get up in the midst of the crowded shop, interrupting the conversation, and start outside to relieve himself. "All who can't swim, mount the highest bench," he would cry out, "for the great he-elephant will now make water!

You'd have to stand twice in the same place to make a shadow.

Ask yourself:...Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth...

the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in.

But it seemed to me that even if everything had been changed, I would have recognized it by the look of the sky.

Big Ellis giggled. "We heard you were dead, Burley." "So did I," Uncle Burley said. "But I knew it was a lie as soon as I heard it.

If we are serious about these big problems, we have got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves. Thus we put an end to our habit of oversimplification. If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we ourselves must be prepared to become poorer. If

For in that little while Port William sank into me, becoming one with the matter and light, and the darkness, of my mind, never again to be far from my thoughts, no matter where I went or what I did.

Sometimes hidden from me in daily custom and in trust, so that I live by you unaware as by the beating of my heart, Suddenly you flare in my sight, a wild rose blooming at the edge of thicket, grace and light where yesterday was only shade, and once again I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before

In other words, if you are fearful of the destruction of the environment, then learn to quit being an environmental parasite.

The woods is old enough to be fairly free of undergrowth. I go along slowly, watching for whatever may present itself.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

It was like falling in love, only more than that; we knew too much by then for it to be only that. It was knowing that love was what it was, and life would not complete it and death would not stop it.