Sitting Quotes (page 67)
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And there was that letter from the Bramleys—that really made me feel good. You don’t find people like the Bramleys now; radio, television and the motorcar have carried the outside world into the most isolated places so that the simple people you used to meet on the lonely farms are rapidly becoming like people anywhere else. There are still a few left, of course—old folk who cling to the ways of their fathers and when I come across any of them I like to make some excuse to sit down and talk...
James Herriot
I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity-how ill they sit on the face, say, of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.
E. M. Forster
Evening prayer. I spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair, Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs, My neck and gut both bent, while in the air. A weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs. Like steaming dung within an old dovecote. A thousand Dreams within me softly burn: From time to time my heart is like some oak. Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn. And then, when I have swallowed down my Dreams. In thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turn. To satisfy a need I can't...
Arthur Rimbaud
it was her company he desired. He wanted to put his arms around her andto sit in silence, staring into the fire, drinking wine, smoking the occasional cigarette; thatwould be enough. Life was made up of simple things; he was weary of all the yearshe had spent searching for something, though quite what he didn't know.
Paulo Coelho
The surveillance, he thought, essentially should be maintained. And, if possible, by me. I should always be watching, watching and figuring out, even if I never do anything about what I see; even if I just sit there and observe silently, not seen: that is important, that I as a watcher of all that happens should be at my place.
Philip K. Dick
What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest.'What do you do?''What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?''Why not?'She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams.'Because... I don't know,' she sighs.I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.
Bret Easton Ellis
A friend is more than a therapist or confessor, even though a friend can sometimes heal us and offer us God's forgiveness. A friend is that other person with whom we can share our solitude, our silence, and our prayer. A friend is that other person with whom we can look at a tree and say, "Isn't that beautiful," or sit on the beach and silently watch the sun disappear under the horizon. With a friend we don't have to say or do something special. With a friend we can be still and know that God...
Henri Nouwen
…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape….
You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back...
Virginia Woolf
The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
Carl Sagan