Quotes About Awareness

Certain white people in particular can look right through young people and also black and mixed race people like we aren't here.

it's like the people in the play are living in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other's worlds. But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what's happening right next to their ears and eyes, they'd see it's the same play they're all in, the same world, that they're all part of the same story.

Real strength was a matter of sensing something alive in you bigger than just your own breathing.

The longer Sacha lives the more insane she realizes the species she belongs to is.

It's on my head, Elisabeth says. That's where it grows. And my face is also attached to my head.

And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see?

Later that night, when she was home and falling asleep on the couch in front of the TV, Elisabeth would remember seeing his eyes open, and how it was like that moment when you just happen to see the streetlights come on and it feels like you're being given a gift, or a chance, or that you yourself've been singled out and chosen by the moment.

Like always having the sound of someone drilling a hole in a wall, not your wall, but a wall like very close to you, George said. Like, say you wake up one morning to the noise of someone along the road having work done on his or her house and you don't just hear the drilling happening, you feel it in your own house, though it's actually happening several houses away.

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves – except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.

Invisible links like these were running between all of the people in the room that day, like they always are, like thin strands of light you couldn't see but you knew were there regardless.

Okay, I said. As long as I've got you here, we're going to use and appreciate this present moment. Because I wish, and I've wished a thousand times since you went, that we'd known it was the present, and that we were living in it.

to speak without thinkin will lead you to an early grave, or to a very small cinder-block cell!

Initiation, or the process of undergoing an expansion of consciousness, is part of the normal process of evolutionary development, viewed on a large scale, and not from the standpoint of the individual.

You know some minutes warn you they're going to be mighty short and you'd better take a snapshot of 'em while you can. ("Golden Baby")

Don't it give you the goose pimples when you realize that white people can kill us and get away with it? Just think of it! We are walkin' targets everywhere we go—on the subway, in the street, everywhere.

understood the world as much as possible through description rather than judgment,

I couldn't help but think hard about what you're supposed to do when the facts seem to be leading you into danger.

The teacher didn't make people with disabilities out to be heroes or sad stories. It was just a description of the world in which people with disabilities were real and present.

While you're alive there's no time for minor amazements.

Every article I wrote in those days, every speech I made, is full of pleading for the recognition of lead poisoning as a real and serious medical problem.

Six a.m.!" Xander cried. "I know that's a number on my clock, but I've never actually been awake to personally witness it!

Once you know some things, you can't unknow them. It's a burden that can never be given away.

Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.