Quotes About Presence

You know when you're with someone who is intellectually powerful: You just know it.

THE LESS OF a man I became, and the more of an automaton, so the dreams and half-memories ceased to plague me. It was as if they had deliberately driven me into this mindless rôle; so long as I continued to be a creature without remorse or conscience they would reward me with their absence. If I again showed signs of ordinary Humanity, then they would punish me with their presence.

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.

We find ourselves in a "collage" in which nothing has moved into the past and no wounds have healed with time, in which everything is present, open and bitter, in which everything coexists contiguously….

But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character --- the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides.

He had begun to fear her presence during the afternoon dismantling. He had to remove it, or she would be with him every time he approached a fuze. He would be pregnant with her.

She thought about Caravaggio--some people you just had to embrace, in some way or another, had to bite into the muscle, to remain sane in their company. You needed to grab their hair and clutch it like a drowner so they would pull you into their midst. Otherwise they, walking casually down the street towards you, almost about to wave, would leap over a wall and be gone for months.

When she woke, she picked up a pair of scissors out of the porcelain bowl, leaned over and began to cut her hair, not concerned with shape or length, just cutting it away—the irritation of its presence during the previous days still in her mind—when she had bent forward and her hair had touched blood in a wound. She would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to death.

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

Genuine listening means suspending memory, desire, and judgment — and, for a moment at least, existing for the other person.

Genuine listening means suspending memory, desire, and judgement and, for a few moments at least, existing for the other person

When chopping onions, just chop onions.

I hope whatever you're doing, / you're stopping now and then / and / not doing it at all.

Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice.

It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to do one thing at a time. One thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly, uni-tasking.

If we could hear the squirrel's heartbeat, the sound of the grass growing, we should die of that roar

One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful—wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself.

antidotes to our abstraction.

I think intellectualizing annoys me because it is the enemy of experience; you cannot experience the presence of God and analyze it at the same time. You can't analyze anything and experience it simultaneously.

A huge part of what we do as actors is learning to ignore the camera, as if it's not even there, while simultaneously being very aware of the camera and what it's capturing, because you can give the best performance of your life, but if you do it with the back of your head facing the camera, it's going to get cut from the movie.

Failing to be there when a man wants her is the greatest sin a woman can commit - except being there when he doesn't want her.

The biggest cardinal sin is not being in the moment, whether in life or on-screen. You owe it to your fellow actor that if they feed you something, you give them an earnest response to what they've said to you as opposed to what you wanted to do before they ever showed up.

You can't do opera when already from the 10th row you can only see little dolls on the stage. In such an enormous space you can't put much faith in the personal presence of the individual singer, which is reflected in facial expressions, among other things.

I always enjoy it when I walk on stage. There were some times when I was working so much in the '80s, and I felt really burnt-out. But I'd be up there singing and not be 10,000 million miles away, you know, just opening my mouth and the words coming out.