Quotes About Presence

Even painfully shy and awkward people are not painfully shy or awkward when they are alone. The way to access this natural, comfortable alone-self when you are with others is by choosing to forbid yourself to wonder what they are thinking. Instead, force yourself to exist in the instant, then take it- and give it- as it comes.

When I ate vanilla frosting straight from the can, I could feel God standing right next to me like a real best friend, watching, and smiling, and wishing he had a mouth.

Nothing worth having comes easy is not about showing up early at the office. It's about showing up in your own life. And living inside the very moment you want to run away from.

By engaging with the person you're with. Which means, not thinking while they're speaking and not forming your answer as they are in the middle of asking the question. Engaging with the person means following carefully what they say, going for the full ride of their dialogue. So that you don't skip over a nuance by mistake. This is what'll keep you from zoning out, avoiding eye contact, looking at the wall like a freak, or sweating too much.

Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.

Trying is not the same as being. Trying flies in a circle around the moment and *being* is inside of it.

I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is.

p.61 He [Roark] was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went. His face was closed like the door of a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that. He was a cold, disquieting presence in the room; his presence had a strange quality: it made itself felt and yet it made them feel that he was not there; or perhaps that he was and they weren't.

He seemed as graciously at home as in the best restaurants of the city; his elegance had an odd quality here—it did not insult the place, but seemed to transform it, like the presence of a king who never alters his manner, yet makes a palace of any house he enters.

Proust fared better. "I cannot even begin to tell you how much pleasure we both derive from the mere presence of LA RECHERCHE in our dwelling," Véra thanked her husband's Gallimard editor, but this before she had begun the Maurois-edited volume, into which she was appalled to see that a great number of slips and misprints had crept. She could not help it; hers was the kind of eye to which typos positively leapt.

Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.

In their wake the bite of incense lingered in the sultry air.

They sit together, physically separate but utterly connected by the moment they've created

People of outstanding abilities and strength of character are born at more or less regular intervals, so it's only the matter of their selection that is uneven. Their presence or absence in a particular field of inquiry can perhaps be explained by the perspectives it opens up.

Someone fond of paradoxes and sufficiently stubborn could go on doubting that the ocean was a living being. But it was impossible to deny the existence of its mind, whatever could be understood by the term. It had become quite clear that it was only too aware of our presence above it…

His wife was a tiny woman who I can best describe as being very present. She was not a woman hiding, nor a woman afraid. She was a woman at rest, at home with herself and with all pistons firing. She was alive and beautiful.

When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all.

You'll begin to act when you can forget your technique - when it is so securely inside you that you need not call upon it consciously.

T)here were always vacancies in the construct of life: blank spaces occupied by the unseen guest, the absent friend.

Why are you here? Her words were a thread of silver in the moonlight. His answer was deep as the deepest shadows. You offered to be my inamorata, remember?

Hygge is experiencing quiet joy in any given moment. It is the complete absence of anything annoying or emotionally overwhelming. It is taking pleasure from the things around you.

and it was there. It will always be there for you now.

It's just hard to see a friend hurt this much. Especially when you can't do anything except 'be there.' I just want to make him stop hurting, but I can't. So I just follow him around whenever he wants to show me his world.

But right now I'm here with you. And I want to know where you are, what you need, and what you want to do.