Quotes About Awareness

A stretch of time when I was rewarded with so many mystic moments, a chunk of red chalk, a chestnut, a rusted piece of scrap metal, a nail, a flat stone shaped like an ancient tablet. Although suggesting little of the magnificent work I had seen, these objects helped inspire my newfound contentedness. I placed them with the same care as a police detective into a clean plastic bag. Evidence of an awareness of the relative value of insignificant things.

Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. Tasks were completed, sump pumps manned, sandbags piled, trees planted, shirts ironed, hems stitched, and yet we reserved the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning.

Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory. — Patti Smith, M Train (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

I came to experience a different kind of prayer, a silent one, requiring more listening than speaking.

I have put gay dating on the map.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little," wrote Mark Twain, "it's that they know so many things that ain't so.")

Today we see studies on mentally retarded children as monstrous.

That's the problem with vaccines. When they work, absolutely nothing happens. Nothing. Parents go on with their lives, not once thinking that their child was saved from meningitis caused by Hib or from liver cancer caused by hepatitis B or from fatal pneumonia caused by pneumococcus or from paralysis caused by polio. We live in a state of blissful denial.

Historian Bettyann Kevles describes a 1920 professional gathering of radiologists, where so many attendees were missing hands and fingers that when the chicken dinner was served no one could cut their meat.

In April 2009, Brendalee and Julieanna Flint traveled to Washington, D.C., to speak to congressional staffers about the importance of vaccines. "Parents need to understand that when they choose not to vaccinate, they are making a decision for other people's children as well," said Brendalee. "Someone else chose Julieanna's path. It doesn't seem fair that someone like Jenny McCarthy can reach so many people while my little girl has no voice.

Look both ways before you cross the street," she tells me. I start to protest, but then it strikes me that if I am very lucky I will one day be able to offer annoying safety tips to my own children one day.

Look both ways before you cross the street," she tells me. I start to protest, but then it strikes me that if I am very lucky I will be able to offer annoying safety tips to my own children one day.

Elliston-Jones know

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.

We find ourselves only by looking to what we're not.

Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'.

It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.

It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.

He finds it extraordinary that on some mornings, just after he has woken up, as he bends down to tie his shoes, he is flooded with a happiness so intense, a happiness so naturally and harmoniously at one with the world, that he can feel himself alive in the present, a present that surrounds him and permeates him, that breaks through him with the sudden, overwhelming knowledge that he is alive. And the happiness he discovers in himself at that moment is extraordinary.

When you live in the city, you learn to take nothing for granted. Close your eyes for a moment, turn around to look at something else, and the thing that was before you is suddenly gone. Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you mustn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.

an exercise in the art of paying attention, and paying attention, Ferguson discovered, was the first step in learning how to be alive.