Quotes About Awareness

This was before I knew that we all live on this planet, driving in the cars of our own little minds, our own self-contained worlds. Yes, this was before I knew that, when I thought that I mattered, when I thought that people saw me, deep into me, saw all my love and excitement at being alive, saw the very glistening, running-overness of my aliveness. But we only matter when we do something awful. Then, someone sees us and only then.

After having much praised or much blamed anybody, one is generally sensible of something just the reverse soon afterwards.

You know, I am so sick of cuttin' on my television and everyone on it is obsessed with livin' forever. Well, I have a news flash: Ain't none of us gettin' out of her alive.

There was a siege going on: it had been going on for a long time, but the besieged themselves were the last to take it seriously.

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening so you might as well.

You know there isn't much to do in life once you fall though the surface of things.

Do you think I'm only here when you look at me?

The minute you become conscious that you are doing good, that's the minute you have to stop because from then on it's wrong.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.

She'd been noticing the feet of colored people ever since she'd come south. "They've been pressed down to the earth so hard," she said. "And the weight of what they carry tortures their feet.

What's more important to understand is that in our endless questing, we never stumble on a beautiful secret: that God's time—kairos time—is always present and available to us, even in the daily dawnings and dyings of the circadian cycle. At any instant, if only we are aware enough to catch it, we can enter a suspended moment that contains within it layer upon layer of history, the multiple petals of the present, and the swirling mists of the future to come.

Monday: Cover Your Mirrors for a Whole Morning

Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other. Maybe it was a state of mind.

There's an old ghost story about that, I remember, how the devil steals souls by asking for them openly. He isn't a thief, but a master manipulator. The real danger, or so the story goes, isn't in the devil himself, but in not knowing you have a choice to turn him away.

I don't know how to describe it, but after the blush of my own company wore off, I became so aware of Earnest's absence it was as if the lack of him had moved into the apartment with me.

In the same way that fish had quickness, cats had a way of being still. That was their gift, and you could learn a lot by watching them get there.

There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, For Whom the Bell Tolls

It feels important to go everywhere one can and see all there is to see and try to understand it.

My mind knew it was all finished, but the heart never knows, or if it does, it does only at the very last possible moment.

There was a feeling, as you sat and ate your nice sandwich or had your tea, that you were on the slowly tipping edge of nothingness and might fall forward at any moment, and that if you did, it was possible that nothing would know you'd ever been there at all. Jim

That's the problem with going into the world, isn't it? You actually have to face things you find you don't want to know. In the same way that fish had quickness, cats had a way of being still. That was their gift, and you could learn a lot by watching them get there. If you lay close with them, and matched your breathing with theirs, you sometimes thought you had a great and very rare secret.

Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other.

Though Kenya was vast, there was surprisingly little privacy in our colony. Everyone seemed to know everyone else's business, particularly when it was personal.