Quotes About Awareness

Life is something we need to stop correcting.

Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise.

His hand goes out, gesturing toward the conifers. It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They're not that hard to hear. The (other) man chuckles. We've been trying to tell you that since 1492.

The psyche's job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we'll behave in any situation. We're all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right . But even when the fog is pointed out, we're no better at navigating through it .

Smart enough to see that you're a sack of rotting meat wrapped around a little sewage tube that's going to give out in—what? Another few thousand sunrises?

The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. MAY WE NOT SEE GOD?

Someday we'll learn again how to train on this living place, and holding still will be like flying.

They wouldn't know how to see what he put in front of their eyes.

Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.

She lies awake at night, staring upward, remembering being right next to the only discovery that matters. Life was whispering instructions to her, and she failed to write them down.

We are not...wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.

That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

How much they knew, these new children. How concentrated their knowledge of every mechanism, except for life.

For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms. Even in a body's most private moments, something else joins in.

You can watch the hour hand, Mimi finds, hold your eyes on it all around the circle of the clock, and never once see it move.

That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next.

What?" he asks the tree. "What? " The tree feels no need to reply.

The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she'll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.

Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head.

great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

plants are willful and crafty and after something, just like people.

But it's the same basic problem: What keeps us from seeing the obvious? Douglas puts his hand to the brass bull's horn. And? What does? Mostly other people.

I wasn't the genre I'd thought I was.

Trees used to talk to people all the time. Sane people used to hear them." The only question is whether they'll talk again, before the end.