Quotes About Presence

We all know that one of the most successful ways to stop pain and presence is to drink or use other drugs. The reason that drunks are dangerous and boring is that they are not there with you, but are lost in another world. Driving when drunk is destructive because you are not present to the road and the traffic around you. You are not in a place of survival and your inability to survive could harm others.

We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away.

I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.

In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself. Entering the perimeters of the white arch, one was greeted by the sounds of bongos and acoustic guitars, protest singers, political arguments, activists leafleting, older chess players challenged by the young. This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem to be oppressive to anyone.

My penance for barely being present in the world, not the world between the pages of books, or the layered atmosphere of my own mind, but the world that is real to others

I revisit my book piles. Trying not to be sidetracked or lured into another dimension.

Perhaps to satisfy my curiosity, my mother enrolled me in Sunday school. We were taught by rote, Bible verses and the words of Jesus. Afterward we stood in line and were rewarded with a spoonful of comb honey. There was only one spoon in the jar to serve many coughing children. I instinctively shied from the spoon but I swiftly accepted the notion of God. It pleased me to imagine a presence above us, in continual motion, like liquid stars.

It pleased me to imagine a presence above us, in continual motion, like liquid stars.

We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.

Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that. I am...

He was there for you, and yet at the same time he was inaccessible. You felt there was a secret core in him that could never be penetrated, a mysterious center of hiddenness. To imitate him was somehow to participate in that mystery, but it was also to understand that you could never really know him.

It was one of the most sublimely exhilarating moments of my life. I was half a step in front of the real, an inch or two beyond the confines of my body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt my skin had become transparent. I wasn't occupying space anymore so much as melting into it. What was around me was also inside me, and I had only to look into myself in order to see the world.

On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.

Me parece que siempre seré feliz allí donde no estoy

Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that.

He did not seem to be a man occupying space, but rather a block of impenetrable space in the forum of a man. The world bounced off him, shattered against him, at times adhered to him - but it never got through.

Baudelaire: Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas. In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself.

Even before his death he had been absent, and long ago the people closest to him had learned to accept this absence, to treat it as the fundamental quality of his being.

vlastito tijelo nastanjivala je poput ma?ke. Nije mi bila toliko lijepa koliko egzoti?na, premda je izraz možda pretjeran za ono što želim re?i. Sposobnost da se ostavi dojam, bilo bi to vjerojatno to?nije onomu što pokušavam re?i, odre?eni samodostatni izgled koji je ?ovjeka tjerao da je poželi gledati ?ak i kad bi samo besposleno sjedila

Nikad nije umeo da bude tamo gde se nalazio. Jer ?itavog svog života, bio je negde drugde, izme?u tu i tamo. Ali nikada sasvim tu. I nikada sasvim tamo.

My mum always said there's a lot of presence in a doorway," he added, staring into one of the eyes. A chill of air trickled down her spine, she could feel the eyes upon her, drawing her in, asking questions and tormenting her very being. "Really? How so?" asked Maggie, with interest. Brick turned his head and presented a puzzled expression. "Well, cause that's where people come in

And so one of the joys of immersing yourself in certain activities, such as hard exercise or a difficult puzzle or being whipped, is that you lose the feeling of being conscious of yourself. You just are.

The ordinary man is aware of his surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to his own personal self. The illumined egoless man is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities.