#sen

. . . at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people - bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it. ↗

— Dennis Potter

#celebrate #comfort #death #importance #now

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. ↗

— Alan Wilson Watts

#memory #names #now #present #time

People may believe that there can be a society where dissent is not permitted, but which is nonetheless not a fear society because everyone agrees with one another and therefore no one wants to dissent. ↗

— Natan Sharansky

#because #believe #dissent #everyone #fear

How many times can a heart be shattered and still be pieced back together? How many times before the damage is irreparable? ↗

— Gwenn Wright

#death #grief #historical-fiction #loss #love

Awkward approximations, dull stammerings which cannot convey my sense of exhilaration as I seem to burst impediments, to exceed bounds of the possible, to experience, in the ruins of the human, the birth of something utterly new. ↗

— Steven Millhauser

#sensation #experience

All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let myself in for? ↗

— C.S. Friedman

#dark #fear #short-sentences #experience

Stillness offers an experience of being and a recognition that being . . . my essence . . . is a part of all Being, all Essence. ↗

— Nancy J. Napier

#essence #meditation #experience

The only reason for this treatment was that they were Jews. ↗

— Muriel Knox Doherty

#holocaust #jews #wwii #experience

You have very accurately described the difficulty of presenting my books on film: many of my characters are alone most of the time, and when they do talk, what they say is mostly lies. That can make for a pretty confusing film. ↗

— Thomas Perry

#alone #books #characters #confusing #described

A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#independent-thought #science #faith