Physicality Quotes

“If I were to believe in God enough to call him a murderer, then I might also believe enough that he, as a spirit, exists beyond death; and therefore only he could do it righteously. For the physical being kills a man and hatefully sends him away, whereas God, the spiritual being, kills a man and lovingly draws him nigh.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“To her, there was no touch as instantaneous and intuitive as the gaze. It was close to being the only way of touching without touch.
Language, by comparison, is an infinitely more physical way to touch. It moves lungs and throat and tongue and lips, it vibrates the air as it wings its way to the listener. The tongue grows dry, saliva spatters, the lips crack. When she found that physical process too much to bear, she became paradoxically more verbose.”
― Han Kang, Greek Lessons

“It seems to me that we do live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherant, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherant. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like.”
― William Golding

“(...) lost in the idea of a disembodied world, one where ideas could hold other ideas, where thoughts could see other thoughts and death couldn’t end thoughts, where one remained alive by thinking, and was not alive if not thinking. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t hold us back the way they do here. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t determine our lives, the lives of others, the ways in which one life could or could not meet the life of another. We would not have to sleep or slam doors or exist in these cells that eat other cells and die anyway, these cells we live in.”
― Catherine Lacey, Pew

“I’m drawn to the Jewish notion of the soul, nephesh, which is not something preexistent but emergent—forming in and through physicality and relational experience. This suggests that we need our bodies to claim our souls. The body is where every virtue lives or dies, but more: our bodies are access points to mystery. And in some way that barely makes sense to me, I’m sure that we have to have feet planted on the ground, literally and metaphysically, to reach towards what is beyond and above us.”
― Krista Tippett

“After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin…The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don’t know how long I held his face and his shoulders and stroked him; as he began to cool I kept my hands on his belly, where the last of his warmth seemed to pool and concentrate. Here the fire of the body came to rest, smoldering longest, down to the last embers.”
― Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir

“Why We Tell Stories

I
Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground

and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers

and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened

and learned to speak”
― Lisel Mueller, Alive Together

“Physical well-being necessitates listening to what you already know, and then taking it seriously enough to act accordingly. When you wake up and feel the impulse to arch your back, stretch and exhale with a loud sigh, for God’s sake, do it.”
― Darrell Calkins, Re:

“Corporeal reality is much more rich and precious than we realize. It feels good to have a body, to surge on currents of emotion, to have nerve endings, mitochondria in our cells, tangible focused energy, the embodiment of light — given a voice.”
― Laurie Perez, The Look of Amie Martine

“That's the crazy thing about Christianity — the idea that the finite can contain the infinite. After all, what is the incarnation if not that? So there's an incredible physicality to the spiritual within the Christian story. There's not this weird sort of  Greek separation, where there's a higher spiritual world and a corrupted, bad world of  flesh. It's all one. Because if God chose to have a body, there's a way in which spiritual things are revealed in the physical things that are all around us — bread, wine, people, tears, laughter.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People

“There was something lacking in these ofay places of amusement or else there was something present that one didn’t find in the black-and-tan resorts in Harlem. The joy and abandon here was obviously forced. Patrons went to extremes to show each other they were having a wonderful time. It was all so strained and quite unlike anything to which he had been accustomed. The Negroes, it seemed to him, were much gayer, enjoyed themselves more deeply and yet they were more restrained, actually more refined. Even their dancing was different. They followed the rhythm accurately, effortlessly and with easy grace; these lumbering couples, out of step half the time and working as strenuously as stevedores emptying the bowels of a freighter, were noisy, awkward, inelegant. At their best they were gymnastic where the Negroes were sensuous.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“Then he saw it. The feet of every man in the congregation were turned backwards at the ankles.”
― Mahvesh Murad, The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories

“°So, if I understand correctly, the linear physical life is infinitely simple compared to the knowledge of the conscious sphere°”
― A.D. Zoltan, Conjunction

“My heart goes out to you of dauntless courage and spirit indomitable,
And though my lips would speak, my spirit forbids me to ask,
“Is your heart as true as your arm?”
― Countee Cullen

“In an era where so many are intent on retreating into their heads, dance remains a vital link—one worth revitalizing even if it means looking stupid—connecting us to the heart of our physicality.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“Lead the way. Just remember that I'm not a very good climber."

"Not very good?" Beetledown laughed. "Like a dog with one leg, to put truth to it.”
― Tad Williams, Shadowheart

“I find it interesting that by saying to someone “you just realized that you’re breathing”, you immediately cause them to go from breathing automatically and subconsciously to having to control their breathing manually and consciously. This is the power of words. It is a real, physical power— somehow, when we flop our tongues around in specific ways, audio waves are created that, when interpreted by the ears of another person, cause a real, physical change in that person such as I described above.”
― Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe

“Physicality’s a cage. And a liberation.

The cells I’ll fill in, they’re magnificent, burgeoning with aliveness! I’m dialed into them like a station on a radio transmitting constantly. First faint and distant, but growing, amassing, volumizing the very idea of a person this body aims to harbor. Glowing like the universe, always growing. Each new cell increases my momentum, tightening the tether.”
― Laurie Perez, The Power of Amie Martine

“Treatments" exist because we're nothing like machines -- "cures" only come when you really see the problem at hand well & deep enough.”
― Andy Harglesis

“Most of the physically disabled people are mentally stable and many of the physically abled people are mentally unstable”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“Physicality wasn’t just about what you could do with your own body but creating solid things too. What kind of figurines could I create with magic as my clay?”
― Eva Chase, Cruel Magic

“Ruth Bowers laid her hand, as she spoke, on Frances's arm and the physical contact was like a burn, distracting her totally. Two days after Steven's death she had lain in bed and thought, I shall never again feel someone else's arms round me, another person's body close up against mine, not sex, not nakedness, just physical closeness, often, casually, with another human being. And now the touch of others--Zoe's quick hugs, Tabitha's dutiful brushing of the cheek--had this disproportionate effect. To be touched was both a sacrilege and a joy.”
― Penelope Lively, Perfect Happiness

“Show business and politics, being run by practical, cigar-smoking businessmen, manufacture personalities on an assembly line. Baseball, fighting for its life, has been stifling them as fast as they appear.
What makes it so sad is that the athlete has a role in our society that reaches even beyond showmanship. The athlete is one of the last symbols of that superfluity of our society, the physical man. The average man finds that although the instincts of his primitive forebears may beat a tomtom in his blood, his own daily conflict has been reduced to the drive downtown, the paper work in the office, the return trip. The conflict is undefined, the enemy is indistinct, the battle remains permanently unsettled. He doesn't really know whether he has won or lost; there is only the vague feeling that he is somehow losing.”
― Bill Veeck, The Hustler's Handbook

“Running isn't me. This body also isn't me. It's a bunch of skin and fat and skeleton carrying around the real me, my brain or my spirit or whatever it is that makes Lizzie. Sometimes I think it was a mistake that I wound up in this body--maybe even a mistake that I wound up being human. Maybe I was supposed to be a tree. Tall, steady, solitary, wise. Watching the rest of the world run.”
― Karen Wilfrid, Just Lizzie

“Atoms, the building blocks of so-called matter, however much they might seem to be physically circumscribed, aren’t actually like tiny billiard balls. That’s kindergarten science.

From a shamanic or alchemical perspective, atoms are
more like sentient waves, their intelligently responsive
existence a blur of potential until they magically appear to materialize.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“So I took him and kept taking him until he had nothing left and we glistened with each other's sweat. Our bodies still knew each other, [...] and here we were at the absolute center of our creation.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“What is meant by "the real world" is most often not the "real" but merely the physical world.”
― Sov8840

“And don’t look for me in a human shape.
I am inside your looking. No room
for form with love this strong.”
― Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“The thing that arrests me is
how we are composed of molecules
(he showed me the figure in the paving stones)
arranged without our knowledge and consent”
― Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck

“A vision flashed through her, of Jem aging, bad morning-and-coffee breath, his body sagging, his body a sack, a conveyance device for his intestines. But this vision yielded to another: under the covers, pressing her own sack of blood and bones against his sack of blood and bones, arms and legs interwoven, two flimsy bodies safe together.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum