Quotes About Presence

felt older. I felt that I had seen ages of the world come and go. Now, finally, I really had lost all desire for change, every last twinge of the notion that I ought to get somewhere or make something of myself. I was what I was. "I will stand like a tree," I thought, "and be in myself as I am." And the things of Port William seemed to stand around me, in themselves as they were.

For in that little while Port William sank into me, becoming one with the matter and light, and the darkness, of my mind, never again to be far from my thoughts, no matter where I went or what I did.

Sometimes hidden from me in daily custom and in trust, so that I live by you unaware as by the beating of my heart, Suddenly you flare in my sight, a wild rose blooming at the edge of thicket, grace and light where yesterday was only shade, and once again I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before

As I buried the dead and walked among them, I wanted to make my heart as big as Heaven to include them all and love them and not be distracted. I couldn't do it, of course, but I wanted to.

The woods is old enough to be fairly free of undergrowth. I go along slowly, watching for whatever may present itself.

Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields. Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.

And so there is the Territory of self-righteousness. It is easy to assume that we do not participate in what we are not in the presence of. But if we are members of a society, we participate, willy-nilly, in its evils.

I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

Aunt Beulah could hear the dust motes collide in a sunbeam; she could hear spiders chewing on flies.

Sometimes he would be finished talking before we had started listening.

He has to reach down with his feet to tread the floor.

The sermon is merely a presence, a distant drone among the humming and singing that the air is already full of, borne away on the fragrance that draws through the windows.

It is not that we want to deceive... but with other people we cannot help our human condition of obscurity. We are not wholly there for them, nor they for us. We are simply not able to be so. Nor should we be. No human occasion calls for our total presence, even were it within our power to offer it.

Maybe that's what a ghost is - a presence of the dead in the dreams of the living.

He is here. There is the sweet perfume of death in the air.' He drew a deep breath. 'I love it even more than the smell of fresh quimmy.

Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell, There God is dwelling too.

Some people stay longer in an hour than others do in a month.

Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.

Then it wasn't and she was, and now it is and she wasn't.

Only her eyes seem to move. It's like they touch us, not with sight or sense, but like the stream from a hose touches you, the stream at the instant of impact as dissociated from the nozzle as though it had never been there.

But I didn't need to see him because he was there, he would always be there; maybe what Druscilla meant by his dream was not something which he possessed but something which he had bequeathed us which we could never forget, which would even assume the corporeal shape of him whenever any of us, black or white, closed our eyes.

She looks at Vardaman; her eyes, the life in them, rushing suddenly upon them; the two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as though someone had leaned down and blown upon them.

If we all but had twenty-four hours more to live, what would we do? And for nearly all, the answer was 'Spend it with the ones I love.

what is it you have, or don't have, that you sit there completely self-contained, that you can sit and know . . . and know exactly where your feet are? Yes, that's what makes cats incredible, because you know they're aware every instant of where their feet are, and they know how much they have to share with other cats, they don't try to . . . pretend . . .