Quotes About Awareness

I don't think white people identify themselves as white Americans. They think their perspective is objective. They don't realize they're always invested in the advancement of white people.

The man doesn't acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. For him, you imagine, it is more like breath than wonder; he has had to think about it so much you wouldn't call it thought.

History's authority over us is not broken by maintaining a silence about its continued effects.

You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition.

Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world. She says sometimes she can hear her own voice saying silently to whomever--you are saying this thing and I am not going to accept it. Your friend refuses to carry what doesn't belong to her. You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus.

Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term - John Henryism - for people exposed to the stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

It was a lesson.

I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room.

Charlotte: Racism exists outside of reason. Black people have never been human. Charles: That is so hopeless. Charlotte: Go further into that hopelessness, and then we can really begin to see each other.

If white people don't see their whiteness, how can they speak to it? Was the student white? Who wrote the scenario? Does diversity not include any training to see ourselves or is it simply about addressing black grievance?

All living is listening for a throat to open-- The length of its silence shaping lives. When he opened his mouth to speak, his speech was what was written in the silence, the length of the silence becoming a living.

Looking around, I wonder about all the white parents surrounding me. Are any of them anxious that these white teachers are overrepresenting the race of their child and therefore affirming white dominance and white hierarchical thinking? Are any concerned that these white teachers, with their overwhelming representation of whiteness, are confirming the racist structures we are all subject to? What is my aim here? I

La crisis de la educación no es una crisis más entre las muchas crisis que tenemos, sino que la educación está en el centro del problema. El mundo está en una crisis profunda porque no tenemos una educación para la conciencia. Tenemos una educación que en cierto modo le está robando a la gente su conciencia, su tiempo y su vida

Did you know humans are the only creatures alive that know about death?

and there I was, caught in the crossfire, aware of how loud a house could be in the absence of sound.

In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge.

A particular bear...sees a particular this

Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.

We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren't, when we never have. We've just been moving along with time. We said, there's another second gone, there's another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.

I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue.

If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.

Life was an ongoing war against unseen and usually undefined enemies. Your own naiveté was one of those enemies. You had to battle it, and improvise, and guard your back. See