Quotes About Presence

If you can't find the truth right where you are, where do you expect to find it?

Handle a single leaf in such a way that it manifests the body of Buddha. This in turn allows Buddha to manifest through the leaf.

when we go someplace, we leave a part of our energy there and we influence more than we can ever imagine.

When you are not losing your mind and you are calm, it doesn't matter what you do. People will see that in you and seek that in you because they don't know what to make out of what they're seeing. And you may not know what to make out of what you're seeing, but you have been prepared.

Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear. Eric Packer about Vija Kinski

You and I. We're here. So might as well.

Lee Oswald] saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas.

Before I fell asleep, eventually, was thinking when I was a small kid how I'd try to imagine the end of the century and what a far-off wonder that was and I'd figure out how old I'd be when the century ended, years, months, days and now look, incredible we're here - we're six years in and I realize I'm the same skinny kid, my life shadowed by his presence, won't step on cracks on the sidewalk, not as superstition but as a test, a discipline, still do it.

It was the kind of day in which you forget words and drop things and wonder what it is you came into the room to get because you are standing here for a reason and you have to tell yourself it is just a question of sooner or later before you remember because you always remember once you are here. The thing is communicated somehow.

When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear.

The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It's a moment never to be thought of except when it's in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn't seem peculiar. It is only me. I don't think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind.

Only absences were fully shared.

They seemed to shine together at the center of things. They made things theirs. A certain bench in the park, near the chess players, ordinary things, not unusual in any way.

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream. May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.

Murray says it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

By the time you listen to this, I'll no longer remember what I said. I'll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They're either picking up or not picking up.

Minnesota is a human moment.

Don't we know when a death is passing in the air?

She took a bite of cereal and forgot to taste it. She lost the taste somewhere between the time she put the food in her mouth and the regretful second she swallowed it.

I got out of bed in the middle of the night and went to the small room at the end of the hall to watch Steffie and Wilder sleep. I remained at this task, motionless, for nearly an hour, feeling refreshed and expanded in unnameable ways.

She wanted to stay focused, one thing following sensibly upon another. There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past

You are here just to be, for no reason. You have no mission except to enjoy life, to be happy. The only thing you need is just to be the real you. Be authentic. Be the presence. Be happiness. Be love. Be joy. Be yourself; that's the main point. That's wisdom.

There is no time to miss anyone or anything because you are alive.