Quotes About Awareness

Someone else's body is a place for your mind to go.

MORE THAN ONCE I'VE AWAKENED WITH TEARS RUNNING DOWN MY CHEEKS. I HAVE HAD TO THINK WHETHER I WAS CRYING OR WHETHER IT IS INVOLUNTARY, LIKE DROOLING.

IT CAN BE STARTLING TO SEE SOMEONE¹S BREATH, LET ALONE THE BREATHING OF A CROWD. YOU USUALLY DON¹T BELIEVE THAT PEOPLE EXTEND THAT FAR.

SOME PEOPLE LIKE TO NIBBLE ON THE INSIDES OF THEIR OWN CHEEKS. IV'E SEEN AN OTHERWISE LOVELY GIRL CONTORT HER FACE TO REACH A FAVORITE SPOT. THERE ARE BIT LINES WHERE REPEATED NIPS HAVE BUILT RIDGES OF SCAR TISSUE.

THERE'S NO REASON TO SLEEP CURLED UP AND BENT. IT'S NOT COMFORTABLE, IT'S NOT GOOD FOR YOU, AND IT DOESN'T PROTECT YOU FROM DANGER. IF YOU'RE WORRIED ABOUT AN ATTACK YOU SHOULD STAY AWAKE OR SLEEP LIGHTLY WITH LIMBS UNFURLED FOR ACTION.

IT CAN BE HELPFUL TO THINK OF THEM EATING YOUR FAVORITE FOODS AND OCCASIONALLY THROWING UP AND GETTING BITS STUCK IN THEIR NOSES.

Those outside of autism need to understand this is an epidemic and we need more government funding, insurance coverage and education reform.

I do believe sadly it's going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe.

What is missing from today's dialogue is the effect autism is having on families, our society and what the unknown factors are. The 300lb. gorilla in the room is that our children with autism today will soon become adults with autism.

As ugly as the truth is, it's even uglier when someone says out loud what you've been thinking to yourself.

My # 1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.

My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I'm joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It's a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody's convincing themselves it's going to be okay, it's there in the air somehow. The whole thing is more physical than mental, he tells me. Like hackles? The way a dog's hackles go up? Yes, he says.

What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer.

If only I'd remembered that old proverb: When three people say you are drunk, go to sleep.

Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.

I slipped it into your papers to see if you would notice." The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention.

But she does get irritated when her college sends around the memo at the end of the semester about how to recognize a suicidal student. She wants to send it back marked up in black letters. How about you look in their eyes?

A soul was like a worm in an apple, my mother told me. Sometimes you went your whole life without knowing you had one and then suddenly it appeared. In Africa, the soul has the same shape as the body but cannot be seen. At night, it travels through the world while a person dreams. But it returns to the body the moment a sleeping person is touched.

He's not doing well with this sleep deprivation. There's a reason it's used as a tool of torture. But still, everyone I know is trying to sleep less. Insomnia as a badge of honor. Proof that you are paying attention.

In some Zen monasteries, gossip is defined as talking about anything not directly in one's gaze.

Some Jews saw walls being built around the ghetto and thought they still had time. Don't be fooled by everyone else's calm. Get out even when nobody is even considering it yet. When you look at 2060, southern Argentina might be a good place for your children since it's close to the Antarctic peninsula, the place where the survivor colonies will be built. …

What the Yoga People say: None of this is banal, if only you would attend to it.

It is important to be on the alert for "the decisive moment," says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.

The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering.