Ayesha > Ayesha's Quotes

“Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways. Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.”
― Don DeLillo

“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. ”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“If he withdraws into the higher part, he is distant from his manifestations and can no longer evaluate them; he no longer knows or experiences his animal nature. If he slides into the other nature, he forgets everything that is not animal, and there is nothing to resist it; he is animal . . . not man. The animal always refuses the angel. The angel turns away from the animal. A conscious man is one who is always vigilant, always watchful, who remembers himself in both directions and has his two natures always confronted.”
― Jeanne De Salzmann, The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff

“As ripples of heat rise into the air, the raindrop will slowly evaporate. But it won’t disappear. Sooner or later, that tiny, translucent bead of water will ascend back to the blue skies. Once there, it will bide its time, waiting to return to this troubled earth again…and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

“Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“To understand your direction, you must know both your roots and your reach.”
― Ana Johns, The Woman in the White Kimono

“Time does not discriminate. It does not care if we are happy or sad. It does not slow or hurry. It’s a linear creature, traveling in one direction, constant even through pain.”
― Ana Johns, The Woman in the White Kimono

“To pick the correct one is fate. To pick the wrong one is also fate.”
― Ana Johns, The Woman in the White Kimono

“Heaven is not some place for your future spirit to rest. It is finding happiness in your current state. And likewise, there are no locks on the gates of hell; it is only suffering and only for a time.”
― Ana Johns, The Woman in the White Kimono

“There once lived a man who loved dragons. He kept paintings and statues of them everywhere and could talk on and on about the majestic beasts to anyone who cared to listen. One day, a dragon heard of this man and his appreciation for his kind. He thought it would surely make him happy to meet an authentic dragon. So, he caught a strong wind and changed his course to visit him in his cave dwelling. When he arrived, the dragon found him sleeping. The man woke to see the giant beast coiled by his side with glistening teeth and green scales reflecting in the moonlight, and he was terrified. Before the dragon could make his introduction, the man reached for his sword and lunged, causing the dragon to jump back and slither away. Sometimes, when Grandmother told this story, she said the dragon represented liking the idea of something more than the thing itself. Other times, she said the true dragon is our real selves, a truth we must sit with and face.”
― Ana Johns, The Woman in the White Kimono

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Everything is dead, the dead are everywhere. There are only people, and all around them is silence—that's the earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Meek One

“In psychotherapy it’s common to think that problems begin at a certain point in life as a result of certain situations, and that the particular time and situation must be dealt with in order to remove the problems. This may be so for particular problems, but suffering begins long before childhood, long before birth. No matter how perfect the childhood, everyone will still have problems.”
― Tenzin Wangyal, Healing with Form, Energy, and Light: The Five Elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra, and Dzogchen

“The highest practice is the one that is most effective, not necessarily the one categorized as “higher.”
― Tenzin Wangyal, Healing with Form, Energy, and Light: The Five Elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra, and Dzogchen

“In the West everyone wants the “highest” practice, a wish that indicates a misunderstanding of the path. Everyone wants to hurry through the foundational practices (ngön dro). But great masters do these practices all their lives. They continue to contemplate impermanence, cultivate compassion, do purification practices, make offerings, and do Guru Yoga. It is not a stage to get over. The most accomplished masters and teachers do these practices and cultivate these qualities all the way to the highest stages of realization, because there is still benefit in doing them.”
― Tenzin Wangyal, Healing with Form, Energy, and Light: The Five Elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra, and Dzogchen

“Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we’re confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner. (That is, from freedom rather than compulsion.) If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch. This is why the various travel metaphors for the psychedelic experience are so apt. The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future. One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful—wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It’s so inefficient!) Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near-future tense, my psychic thermostat set to a low simmer of anticipation and, too often, worry. The good thing is I’m seldom surprised. The bad thing is I’m seldom surprised.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material.” That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical.” Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn’t reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spiritual—idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“We should enjoy this summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we’ll see.”
― André Gide

“Ante ciertos libros, uno se pregunta: ¿quién los leerá? Y ante ciertas personas uno se pregunta: ¿qué leerán? Y al fin, libros y personas se encuentran.”
― André Gide

“Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to - they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don't find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia - the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything - but they don't want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value - and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“Survivor's skin is a remorse we are cursed to wear forever.”
― Zoulfa Katouh, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

“These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive, spontaneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they had marked for destructions.”
― Nella Larsen, Quicksand

“You can kill people with sound. And if you can kill, then maybe there is also the sound that is opposite of killing. And the distance between these two points is very big. And you are free--you can choose. In art everything is possible, but everything is not necessary.”
― Arvo Pärt

“If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds