#conscious

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. ↗

— Graham Greene

#creative-process #daily-life #preoccupations #subconscious #superficiality

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#consciousness #leary #reality #life

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding. ↗

— Andrew Sean Greer

#hiding-things #mind #secrets #marriage

How do you know, right now, that you are aware of being aware, or conscious? ↗

— Henry Reed

#being #conscious #do you know #how #know

No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother. ↗

— Margaret Sanger

#call #choose #consciously #control #does

Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value. ↗

— John Ralston Saul

#conscious #measuring #money #real #value

So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out. ↗

— Robert Sheckley

#comes #consciously #even #fiction #hoped

For the first time in your conscious memory; for the first time in fact, since your were a baby; a single tear, full and warm, rolled down your right cheek and you fell into a very deep and entirely dreamless slumber. ↗

— Dave Sim

#cheek #conscious #deep #down #entirely

I have to be self-conscious of what I'm trying to do with my life. ↗

— Elie Wiesel

#life #my life #self-conscious #trying

After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's... ↗

— Philip Pullman

#change