“There is so much truth in children and so little self-consciousness. It always strikes me that they are so capable of losing and finding themselves and also losing and finding those things they feel close to.”

The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

It was like they waited to tell each other things that had never been told before. What she had to say was terrible and afraid. But what he would tell her was so true that it would make everything all right.

The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.

Sometimes this fellow’s music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.

The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light.

When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?

Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons–throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.

We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want.

I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.

Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.

All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.

When you have abandoned all past and future, it is as if you have come alive. You are here, mindful…the nature of all types of consciousness reveals itself.

You get to be wiser by storying the world and seeing it through other forms of consciousness than your own.

We no longer demand that sensory consciousness be anything other than an existing condition that we can use skillfully according to time and place.

But personally, I don’t think my work and my understanding of art is so much related to being Chinese, but the character of that. Maybe it’s beyond my own consciousness.

Enlightenment is the unaltered state of consciousness

Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.

Thoughts are just moving through consciousness. They have no power. Nothing has reality until you reach it, grab it, and somehow impregnate it with the power of belief.

Only when the pursuit ceases, is it possible to recognize what comprises you: pure being, pure consciousness. This is actually the very substance of your own self and being.