Edith > Edith's Quotes

“Consciousness is the one and only reality, not figuratively but actually. This reality may for the sake of clarity be likened unto a stream which is divided into two parts, the conscious and the subconscious. In order to intelligently operate the law of consciousness it is necessary to understand the relationship between the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious is personal and selective; the subconscious is impersonal and non-selective. The conscious is the realm of effect; the subconscious is the realm of cause. These two aspects are the male and female divisions of consciousness. The conscious is male; the subconscious is female. The conscious generates ideas and impresses these ideas on the subconscious; the subconscious receives ideas and gives form and expression to them. By this law-first conceiving an idea and then impressing the idea conceived on the subconscious-all things evolve out of consciousness;”
― Neville Goddard, Feeling is the Secret

“With your desire defined, quietly go within and shut the door behind you. Lose yourself in your desire; feel yourself to be one with it; remain in this fixation until you have absorbed the life and name by claiming and feeling yourself to be and to have that which you desired. When you emerge from the hour of prayer you must do so conscious of being and possessing that which you heretofore desired.”
― Neville Goddard, Your Faith is Your Fortune

“Do not waste one moment in regret, for to think feelingly of the mistakes of the past is to reinfect yourself. “Let the dead bury the dead” [Matthew 8:22; Luke 9:60]. Turn from appearances and assume the feeling that would be yours were you already the one you wish to be.”
― Neville Goddard, Feeling is the Secret

“To be conscious of being poor while praying for riches is to be rewarded with that which you are conscious of being, namely, poverty. Prayers to be successful must be claimed and appropriated. Assume the positive consciousness of the thing desired.”
― Neville Goddard, Your Faith is Your Fortune

“You are already that which you want to be, and your refusal to believe it is the only reason you do not see it.”
― Neville Goddard

“All you can possibly need or desire is already yours. You need no helper to give it to you; it is yours now. Call your desires into being by imagining and feeling your wish fulfilled. As the end is accepted, you become totally indifferent as to possible failure, for acceptance of the end wills the means to that end. When you emerge from the moment of prayer, it is as though you were shown the happy and successful end of a play although you were not shown how that end was achieved. However, having witnessed the end, regardless of any anticlimactic sequence, you remain calm and secure in the knowledge that the end has been perfectly defined.”
― Neville Goddard, Feeling is the Secret

“156. Why is the sky blue? -A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.

157. The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, "The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue." In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Those who try to make room for sex as mere casual enjoyment pay the penalty: they become shallow. At any rate the talk that reflects and commends this attitude is always shallow. They dishonour their own bodies; holding cheap what is naturally connected with the origination of human life.”
― G.E.M. Anscombe, Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics

“The reckoning what to do or abstain from in particular circumstances will constantly include a reference, implicit or explicit, to generalities. […] Because of it human conduct is not left to be distinguished from the behavior of other animals by the fact that in it calculation is used by which to ascertain the means to perfectly particular ends. The human wants things like health and happiness and science and fair repute and virtue and prosperity, he does not simply want, e.g., that such-and-such a thing should be in such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time.”
― G.E.M. Anscombe, The collected philosophical papers of G.E.M. Anscombe

“What people are for is, we believe, like guided missiles, to home in on God, God who is the one truth it is infinitely worth knowing, the possession of which you could never get tired of, like the water which if you have you can never thirst again, because your thirst is slaked forever and always. It's this potentiality, this incredible possibility, of the knowledge of God of such a kind as even to be sharing in his nature, which Christianity holds out to people; and because of this potentiality every life, right up to the last, must be treated as precious. Its potentialities in all things the world cares about may be slight; but there is always the possibility of what it's for. We can't ever know that the time of possibility of gaining eternal life is over, however old, wretched, 'useless' someone has become.”
― G.E.M. Anscombe, Contraception and chastity

“A man’s conscience may tell him to do the vilest things.”
― Elizabeth Anscombe

“Sexual acts are not sacred actions. But the perception of the dishonour done to the body in treating them as the casual satisfaction of desire is certainly a mystical perception. I don't mean, in calling it a mystical perception, that it's out of the ordinary. It's as ordinary as the feeling for the respect due to a man's dead body: the knowledge that a dead body isn't something to be put out for the collectors of refuse to pick up. This, too, is mystical; though it's as common as humanity.”
― G.E.M. Anscombe, Contraception and chastity

“Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Do you like her'
''Of course!' What a question! Like asking her if she believe in God.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Why does everybody think I'm so wild? I'm not wild. I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path.”
― Cookie Mueller, Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller

“People who've never traveled on the ocean have no idea how scary it is to be on a little boat out there with no land in sight, waves towering over you while you do into the valley of a swell with nothing to see except water... water and sky, no other boas anywhere, no semblance of any kinds of firm reality at all. The main thing one shouldn't do is imagine things. One shouldn't think about the boat tipping over, just falling over and rolling under. Things like that happen all of a sudden. A gigantic three story high wave could whollop the boat broadside. Splash! Whoops! You're gone! No hint of a boat in about three minutes! If you don't get sucked under with it, then where are you?”
― Cookie Mueller

“Change is seen as something evil only by those who have lost their youth or sense of humor.”
― Cookie Mueller, Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller

“Suddenly the effects of the Jack Daniels were wearing thin and the black reality of a speed crash was barreling in on. Mink began scribbling a note on a Tampax paper, "HELP!! WE ARE BEING ABDUCTED BY ASSHOLES!! CALL THE POLICE IMMEDIATELY!!”
― Cookie Mueller, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black

“You certainly can be allergic to milk, and probably have been all your life. Descendants of people from countries who herded dairy animals and lived on a dairy diet are usually tolerant to milk. Their intestines contain the enzyme lactase that breaks down milk sugar or lactose. Now those whose ancestors never used milk are usually intolerant.”
― Cookie Mueller, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories

“Actually, another problem which I think must be faced is that at any particular point in human history people have not understood what oppression is. It's something you learn. If go back to, say, my parents or grandmother, she didn't think she was oppressed by being in a super patriarchal family where the father would walk down the street and not recognize his daughter when she came because—not because he didn't know who she was, but because you don't nod to your daughter. It didn't feel like oppression. It just felt like the way life works. I mean, what psychic effects it had internally—well, that's a complicated question. But, as anyone involved in any kind of activism knows—say the women's movement—one of the first tasks is to get people to understand that they are living under conditions of oppression and domination. It isn't obvious, and who knows what forms of oppression and domination we are just accepting without even noticing them. At some further stage of self-enlightenment and communal understanding we will recognize that those are the things we have to deal with and we can't plan for them if we don't know about them.”
― Noam Chomsky, Chomsky On Anarchism

“Large shapes — like wings — float up to her, opening and closing — gently at first — until they slowly fill the room and she has the impression that she is in the presence of apparitions which are not at all related to this world. None of her acquaintances has ever mentioned similar apparitions to her. These beings — she can not describe them in any other way, reveal that they have the clear and frightening intention of encircling her. They exude a feeling of dissipation, of annihilation, and her forgotten childhood fear of the horrible and inexplicable returns to her. Whenever these birdless, greyish-black wings fly up too close to her, she raises her hand in a sudden anxiety and fends them off. They retreat for a moment into the background of the dark room, then approach once again, and slowly she gets used to this strange presence until she notices that the wings are insubstantial and can fly straight through her upright body, as if she herself had become bodiless. This both entrances and appalls her. Looking at them carefully, these creatures have in fact nothing terrifying about them — they lack eyes and faces, and they radiate an enormous dignity, an uncanny seriousness, something very noble.”
― Unica Zürn, The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts

“But how long must she sing in the darkness until she is at last allowed out into the light of day?”
― Unica Zürn, The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts

“Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry

“When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems,
When I am dead, even then
I am still listening to you.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“The universe is not made of atoms; it's made of stories.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?'

'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Obsessions are the only things that matter.”
― Patricia Highsmith