Slowness Quotes

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.

Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally received and practiced on.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole.”
― Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?

“In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“...they never see what they're too much of a hurry to look for”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“we must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves”
― Will Durant, Ariel Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“The way contemporary history is told is like a huge concert where they present all of Beethoven’s one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“The lesson was that in walking, the authentic sign of assurance is a good slowness. What I mean is a sort of slowness that isn’t exactly the opposite of speed. In the first place it’s the extreme regularity of paces, a uniformity. Here one might almost say that a good walker glides, or perhaps that his legs rotate, describing circles. A bad walker may sometimes go fast, accelerate, then slow down. His movements are jerky, his legs form clumsy angles. His speed will be made of sudden accelerations, followed by heavy breathing. Large voluntary movements, a new decision every time the body is pushed or pulled, a red perspiring face. Slowness really is the opposite of haste.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“When I was sixteen I read ten books a week: E.E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster--but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose,
or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole.”
― Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?

“I used to think the quiet patches felt dead. Now they feel more alive. Like leaning over and listening to the earth's heartbeat.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“Every night I want to be Heathcliff with Cathy tapping at the window. I want to be Hamlet on the windy battlements. I want the Flying Dutchman to dock. I want what everyone who has lost someone wants: a visitation.

Every second, someone dying is promising to come back from the dead. Every hour, waiting for it to happen, someone living notches up another hour lost.

For the Dead, time stops. For the living, time slows. I am in slow-motion now. It takes me twice as long to clean my teeth, half the morning to make coffee and wash the cup. When I go shopping, I don't remember what I need.

That's because it's you I need. I stare at the bag of potatoes, the packet of bacon. Absurd. Go home.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Night Side of the River

“How like her, though, just to stand and stare at the jets hitting the water. She loved to notice things. Had taught Judith how to be still in a world that moved too quick. "We're not mice," she used to say. "There's no need to scurry.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Night Side of the River

“To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing--a life so slow it constantly verges on tedium, but pondered enough never to find itself there.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“That question cries again--
What is the least we know?
I call the slug my kin,
And move with those born slow.”
― Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke

“Presence is the practice of fully inhabiting where you are, with openness and attention, rather than rushing past toward what comes next. Presence does not mean every moment is blissful. Sometimes the present holds discomfort, uncertainty, or boredom. To be present is not to deny these, but to allow them space without immediately trying to escape.”
― Ajmal, from the book "Borders of the Inner World"

“We will be old and gray before ten Maine minutes go by. Mainers invented tantric sex when they had a quickie.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Holidays with Bigfoot

“How not to think of loss,

how it takes hold and grows: like lacuna
snails, slow and deliberate, on a reed?

Why is everything I see the past
I've tried to forget?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“Much changes in eighteen months on earth, in the age of acceleration that began around the turn of the millennium and still continues to this day. All our stories are told more quickly now, we are addicted to the acceleration, we have forgotten the pleasures of the old slownesses, of the dawdles, the browses, the three-volume novels, the four-hour motion pictures, the thirteen-episode drama series, the pleasures of duration, of lingering. Do what you have to do, tell your story, live your life, get out quickly, spit spot.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“Don’t criticize or condemn yourself when you find yourself following after thoughts. The fact that you’ve caught yourself reliving a past event or projecting into the future is enough to bring you back to the present moment and strengthens your intention to meditate. Your intention to meditate as you engage in practice is the crucial factor.
It’s also important to proceed slowly. My father was very careful to tell all his new students, including me, that the most effective approach in the beginning is to rest the mind for very short periods many times a day. Otherwise, he said, you run the risk of growing bored or becoming disappointed with your progress and eventually give up trying altogether. “Drip by drip,” the old texts say, “a cup gets filled.”

(…) there is one very practical guideline, which my father emphasized again and again to all of his students in a way that would make it easy for us to remember: Short periods, many times.

(…) Meditation is about learning to work with the mind as it is, not about trying to force it into some sort of Buddhist straitjacket.”
― Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness

“Life is punctuated by big, memorable events... But most of our days are built from the seemingly ordinary moments in between . ... When we rush from milestone to milestone, we often treat these spaces as filler, something to get through on the way to somewhere more important. Yet these inbetween moments are where much of our life happens, and they have their own kind of magic”
― Ajmal, from the book "Borders of the Inner World"

“When we overlook them, life can start to feel like a series of disjointed highlights rather than a cloth spun with continuous thread. There is also opportunity in the spaces between. They are pockets of time where we can breathe, reflect and be present. ... Appreciating these spaces requires a shift in perspective. It asks us to stop viewing them as barriers to better things. It invites us to be curious about the quiet”
― Ajmal, from the book "Borders of the Inner World"

“Boredom has a bad reputation. In a world of constant entertainment, the slightest lull sends us to our phones. Yet boredom can be a doorway. When we are bored, our minds begin to wander. Without external input, we may turn inward. Ideas bubble up. Connections form. Boredom is the soil from which creativity often grows.”
― Ajmal, from the book "Borders of the Inner World"

“We are surrounded by miracles too common to notice. Think of the intricate patterns on a butterfly’s wing... or the way a seed split open becomes a tree. We often overlook these marvels because we are distracted by busier, louder things. ... Yet the capacity for wonder lives inside us; we just need to look closely”
― Ajmal, from the book "Borders of the Inner World"

“We place an intention into the world-a wish, a prayer, a dream, and then we wait. In our culture of instant results, waiting can feel like failure. Yet waiting is its own kind of art. It is a posture of trust that something unseen is unfolding even when nothing visible happens. It asks us to surrender our timelines and to be fully present where we are”
― Ajmal, from the book "Borders of the Inner World"

“The most radical act is sometimes to refuse to be hurried.”
― Lawrence Nault

“Writers, believers in words, could not give up words when the going got rough. I found myself, as millions did, turning to poetry. But many of us have always turned to poetry. Whey should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

“if you slowed you could discover that mosquitoes bat
their wings six hundred times a second and before they mate
synchronize their wings you could feel how they flicker with
desire”
― Arthur Sze, Sight Lines

“you can urge the dare and thrill
of bliss if and when you stop to look at a rock at a fence post
but you cough only look yes look at me now because you are blink
about to leave—”
― Arthur Sze, Sight Lines

“I crumple paper to encourage the flame,
And for a brief moment everything is lit.

But the logs haven't caught,
Just seem to smolder and shrink
As the heat works its way to their center.

Getting to what I want
Will be slow going and mostly smoke.”
― Tracy K. Smith, The Body's Question