Quotes About Presence

When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the 'I' whose predicate can be 'love' or 'fear' or 'want,' and whose object can be 'someone' or 'nothing' and it won't really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around 'I' like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else.

There in the dark and the quiet I felt I could forget all the tedious particulars and just feel the presence of his mortal and immortal being.

God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of the holy, so that we can feel and know the presence of the Lord, who is with us always. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence.

If appearance is only a trick of the nerves, and apparition is only a lesser trick of the nerves, a less perfect illusion, then this expectation, this sense of a presence unperceived, was not particularly illusory as things in this world go.

Sylvie did not want to lose me. She did not want me to grow gigantic and multiple, so that I seemed to fill the whole house, and she did not wish me to turn subtle and miscible, so that I could pass through the membranes that separate dream and dream. She did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be

He imagined her sitting in that overstuffed chair in the evening lamplight, reading while he read, listening while he told her how long the days would be if he did not almost believe she was with him there.

What use was there in calling a day by a certain name, or thinking of it as anything but weather? They knew what time of the year it was when the timothy bloomed, when the birds were fledging. They knew it was morning when the sun came up. What more was there to know? If Doll was going to be lost forever, Lila wanted to be right there with her, holding to the skirt of her dress. She had

Did you see Lucille? No. Yes. Lucille was everywhere, but we did not speak.

an old pastor's anxiety for his church is likewise a forgetfulness of the fact that Christ is Himself the pastor of His people and a faithful presence among them through all generations.

People don't understand that the hardest thing is actually doing something that is close to nothing. It demands all of you...there is no object to hide behind. It's just you.

I think communication starts when words are not present at all. I think we put so much emphasis on language, actually silence is so much more important.

You think you're disconnected. But the question is, what are you disconnected from? You're actually constantly disconnecting from yourself by having all these things.

he did not have that personal magnetism, that animal force

Las referencias feroces, aunque vagas, que escuchaba en boca de los cadetes, estimulaban su imaginación. En sueños, el nombre se presentaba dotado de atributos carnales, extraños y contradictorios, la mujer era siempre la misma y distinta, una presencia que se desvanecía cuando iba a tocarla o lo sumía en una ternura infinita y entonces creía morir de impaciencia.

Healing needs listening with the inner ear, stopping the incessant blather, listening.

Since you left there's been a you-shaped space beside me, all the time. It never goes away.

You're mistaking love for perfection, I said. Real love when it's there? It's just there . It's a metal folding chair.

You see, that priest—he was still there, hanging on, silently waiting at the perimeter. An oily shadow always around.

I could hear his breathing, every breath he borrowed from the world then set free.

The word that comes to mind is "equanimity." After meditating, I was better able to watch what happened around me without jumping into reactions.

One of the most convicting things I have recently come to realize about Jesus is that He was never, not once, in a hurry.

Not that she could have chosen to have the wind move through her hair the way it did, or commanded the sunlight to brighten her eyes. What she did had nothing to do with hair or eyes but with the way she moved that made the sky seem to long for her.

I took my morning walk, I took my evening walk, I ate something, I thought something, I wrote, I napped and dreamt something too, and with all that something, I still have nothing because so much of something has always been and always will be you. I miss you.

Practically speaking, we were created to live all of life in the presence of God, under the authority of God, by the Word of God, to the glory of God. We were created to live all of life before the face of God, knowing that nothing in our life is secular or separated from the sight of God because all of life is sacred. To live otherwise is sacrilege