Quotes About Awareness

The fact that so many thoughts could have gone through my head in 3.36 seconds is testament to the infinitude of an individual consciousness. There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves.

Power is like that; everyone feels it at once.

see how everything now is precious, how someday I'll know I was lucky to be here.

I sensed immediately that he'd once been overweight. He moved with a fat person's tiptoey apology.

I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.

I turn to contemporary fiction seeking a shared awareness with the writer of the cultural moment we both occupy, its peculiar challenges.

Being only where you were was incomplete, but being not at all where you were (because you were getting upset by the conversation you were having on your cell phone) was flat-out hazardous. That's when you walked in front of cars.

An army of children: the incarnation of faith in those who weren't aware of having any left.

Knowing your latitude and longitude is not the same as knowing where you are.

NICOLE CULLEN Long Tom Lookout

Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall.

The sheer ordinariness of it all confounded Phoebe, as if any one of these things might happen several times a day, with no one watching. They belong to each other, she thought, and found herself awed by the notion -- knowing someone was there, just there, reaching for that person without a thought.

Losing Pamela had left a shadow of sadness that he'd grown so used to, he'd stopped noticing it. And now it had lifted.

If you ever find yourself thinking that a mass human extinction event would be good for population control, you might want to get checked out.

Being observed felt like an action, the only one worth taking.

We work in the realm of the impression.

I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.

I had absolutely no idea how I had ballooned during my pregnancy. All I thought about was eating plenty of food to keep my baby healthy.

If you've never experienced a sense of dysphoria with your own body, all I can say is, Lucky you. But just because you have not experienced this yourself does not mean it is not real in the hearts of others.

Since then, the awareness that I was in the wrong body, living the wrong life, was never out of my conscious mind—never, although my understanding of what it meant to be a boy, or a girl, was something that changed over time.

And at every moment as I lived my life, I countered this awareness with an exasperated companion thought, namely, Don't be an idiot. You're not a girl. Get over it. But I never got over it.

Most of the time I just have to resign myself to the fact that this whole business is beyond comprehension for most straight people. If you're not trans, you're free from thinking about what gender you are in the same way that white people in America are generally free from having to think about what race they are.

We all have a responsibility to volunteer somewhere and I'm lucky that I get the education and get taken to places to see what's out there and see what's happening and to then be a part of it in hopefully an impactful way.

My mother is a big believer in being responsible for your own happiness. She always talked about finding joy in small moments and insisted that we stop and take in the beauty of an ordinary day. When I stop the car to make my kids really see a sunset, I hear my mother's voice and smile.