Quotes About Presence

The objective level is not words, and cannot be reached by words alone. We must point our finger and be silent, or we will never reach this level.

good listeners have a humble perspective. Humility in listening means that we let go of preconceived opinions, we let go of the need to be right, we let go of our own insecurities, and we let go of the need to appear wise, good or spiritual. In short, we let go of ourselves in order to be present to the other. This is a high calling and a commitment we will need to return to again and again.

That was the way love was, invisible, there whether or not you wanted to see it or admit to it.

If you believed in something strongly and give it enough credence, it could appear right in front of you. Though it had been created in your mind, it would claim a presence in the real world, a monster at your door, a demon pulling at your coat sleeve.

What looked empty was full, much like water in a cup. What was most important was invisible to the eye.

We know what we need when we get it, Brock Stewart had once said. Elinor understood this to be true whenever she heard Jenny in the hallway, when she looked up from her work in the garden to see a light burning in the kitchen. She knew it when the kettle on the back burner of the stove whistled, when the back door opened and shut, when the house she lived in wasn't empty. She hadn't understood how alone she'd been until she was no longer alone. She had cut herself off...

Do you think your mother came back? Shelby asks him. Definitely. She's a cardinal who lives in my backyard.

If you believed in something strongly and gave it enough credence, it could appear right in front of you. Though it had been created in your mind, it would claim a presence in the real world, a monster at your door, a demon pulling at your coat sleeve.

what she misses most is someone knowing she's alive

A person got to really see things if she wasn't racing through life

I'm really happy that you're here." This is not an outright lie. No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.

Sue isn't the only one to be overwhelmed and brought to tears. Lots of people are doing it, just standing there crying. They're letting it all out, their sorrow, their desperation, their hope, right there, right now, in the presence of Helene's shrine, for that is what the house has become.

If you are loved, you never lose the person who loved you. You carry them with you all your life. They were with her as she ran.

You're not invisible if you talk.

was a spectacular and lonely landscape that I wished my father could see. I wished he could take off his shoes and climb over the rocks and wave to me and that he would be here in this world once again, if only for a few hours.

She could recognize the change in the air when anybody in her family, anywhere in the house, began to read. The air was roomier, because the reader was elsewhere.

He was a broad-faced man who looked good in hats. Who

This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.

He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him.

It was a most insistent place but nobody seemed to be overwhelmed by all the insistence.

The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of thier bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.

Hey, Ocean Eyes," my father said. "Where'd you go on us?

If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.

She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.