Quotes About Awareness

For one awful, long moment she is hanging head-downward, wings open, like a turkey in a butcher's shop, only her head is turned right-way-up and she is seeing more than she has ever seen before in her whole short life. Her world was an aviary no larger than a living room. Then it was a box. But now it is this; and she can see everything:

Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine.

Consider this, and in our time As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman:

people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine.

They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.

T)he realisation that there is a particular form of intelligence in the world that is boar-intelligence, boar-sentience. And being considered by a mind that is not human forces you to reconsider the limits of your own.

It's part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching. That

You cannot know what it is like to be a bat by screwing your eyes tight, imagining membranous wings, finding your way through darkness by talking to it in tones that reply to you with the shape of the world.

that when you wanted to see something very badly,sometimes you had to stay still,stay in the same place, remember how much you wanted to see it,and be patient.If you want to see hawks you have to be patient too.

Have you ever watched a deer walking out from cover? They step, stop, and stay, motionless, nose to the air, looking and smelling. A nervous twitch might run down their flanks. And then, reassured that all is safe, they ankle their way out of the brush to graze.

These alarm calls remind me that we have consequential presence, that the animals we like to watch are creatures with their own needs, desires, emotions, lives.

It struck me then that perhaps the bareness and wrongness of the world was an illusion; that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if I could not see them - that if I stood in the right place, and was lucky this might somehow be revealed to me.

When you are faced with food that has been sterilized, fumigated, hydrogenated, hydrolyzed, homogenized, colored, bleached, puffed, exploded, defatted, degermed, texturized, or if you don't know what has been done to it, the safest rule is not to eat it.

Would that be dangerous, to not look while being looked at?

So she quit working to make sense of things— we don't realise it, but it's hard work we do almost every waking moment, building out thoughts and memories and actions around time, things that happened yesterday, and things that are happening right now, and what's coming tomorrow, layering all of that simultaneously and holding it in balance.

You feel you've seen a hundred of me. You know how my tiny mind works. But maybe it goes both ways.

I am here, reading with you. I am reading this over your shoulder. I make your home home, I'm the Braille on your wallpaper that only your fingers can read—I tell you where you are. Don't turn to look at me. I am only tangible when you don't look.

Funny to do something and then realise the reason for it afterwards.

Whenever they were together they couldn't let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that their were either forgotten or misremembered.

know the risk I run when I find fault with people more often than I look for something to appreciate. It's like having grit in your eye; you see less and less of the real person standing right in front of you and more and more of the grit in your eye.

A rustle handle turning, or a wooden door forced open until its hinges buckle, or to me, to me it was the sound of something growing. I sometimes imagine that if we could hear trees growing we'd hear them... creak...like that.

Mrs. Fletcher tells Mom over and over that she should be making more conversation with me, because apparently I'm at a "dangerous age." (She's got to be talking about menstruation. I haven't started yet, but there's probably some risk of bleeding to death if you're taken unawares the first time. I won't be caught unawares, though. That's not how I'm going out.)

Dad has what I think of as only child darkside syndrome; he does everything as if he is being watched.

Sometimes our subconscious is so transparent it's boring