Quotes About Awareness

I have talked and listened and heard and there is no me!

It was slowly dawning on me that innocence is a protection. They knew very well, better than I, how harsh the world is. And they realized early on they had one of two choices: to be bitter; or to enjoy what they had.

For so long I'd been doing what I'd accused other people of doing—I was seeing the deafness, not the people.

Having hearing children meant they had to come into contact with hearing people even more frequently than they would have otherwise—hearing teachers and scout leaders wouldn't have been such a part of their lives.

Immediately the stranger would bend over toward me and ask, "Does he lip-read?" as if Dad had suddenly become as inanimate as a cigar store Indian.

For the first time, it hit me that my mother and father were deaf.

Every day they met with constant, irritating reminders of their shortcomings, from the petty annoyance of not being able to ask for a cup of coffee in a restaurant, to the sobering knowledge that they couldn't hear cars careening around corners, and that deaf people had been shot in the back by policemen when they hadn't heard a command to halt.

That was another thing hearing people did—made too-large movements. It was tantamount to shouting.)

I seemed to be the only one who noticed, the only one who was concerned that doing the right thing for the wrong reason doesn't make you a person of integrity.

Life is finite. (Duh.) Time is valuable. (Ditto.) And so am I. I'm valuable. I'm starting to treat myself as valuable.

God is always seeking you. Every sunset. Every clear blue sky. Each ocean wave. The starry hosts of night. He blankets each new day with the invitation, 'I am here.

They have understood of others' lives what they were capable of understanding. But even if it were like that, it would be otherwise.

Tout ce qui n'est pas moi est incompréhensible.

If you still have to ask, shame on you.

If you gotta ask, you'll never know.

Man, if you gotta ask you'll never know.

If you can sense the corruption in me, it is ... because there's a dose of it in you.

Once somebody's aware of a plot, it's like a bone sticking out. If it breaks through the skin, it's very ugly.

Only when someone becomes vital do we try to give that first encounter the importance it would later have

There is a rhythm in life, a certain beauty which operates by a variation of lights and shadows, happiness alternating with sorrow, content with discontent, distilling in this process of contrast a sense of satisfaction, of richness that can be captured and pinned down only by those who possess the gift of awareness.

The logic of words should yield to the logic of realities.

The garden where you sit Has never a need of flowers, For you are the blossoms And only a fool or the blind Would fail to know it

but then the general trouble with ignorance is always that the ignorant person has no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius.

Don't give into him at all. Deny yourself. Because then your eyes will not be clouded by a madness that you cannot control, and then you will be able to learn to see him as he is. Do you understand?