Quotes about Consciousness

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?

To speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for when they were silent they were keenly conscious of each other's presence, and yet words were either too trivial or too large.

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded. The brain must wake now. The body must contract now, entering the house, the lighted house, where the door stood open, where the motor cars were standing, and bright women descending: the soul must brave itself to endure. He opened the big blade of his pocket-knife.

She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup. as if there was an eddy--there--and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it.

Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head.

There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and obeyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision.

Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to finish. What was seen begun - like two friends starting to meet each other across the street - was never seen ended. After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself...

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

All mists curl off the roof of my being.

And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues.

The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.

To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.