Quotes & Sayings About Needing Time Away

But I think her feelings about our mother were a heavy burden in her life, at least when they were together. When our mother was far away, maybe she could forget her. Our mother was always stepping on her to get up higher, always needing to be right, always needing to be better than her, and than all of us, most of the time. The terrible innocence of our mother, too, as she did that. She had no idea, most of the time. — Lydia Davis

A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration
it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself. — John Cage

There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently. We are being gentle when we describe such deaths as instant. 'The passengers died instantly.' Did they? It may be that some people can do it, can die instantly. The very old, because the vital powers are weak; the very young, because there is no great accretion of experience needing to be scattered. Muhammad Atta was 33. As for him (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporisation; perhaps this was true even for the wall-shadows of Japan), it took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood ... Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended. — Martin Amis

I can focus for hours on end reading, writing, or playing poker. The rest of the world disappears; I can forget it exists. It calms me, and the stress melts away. When I'm focused on one of my interests, I lose track of time, forget to eat, and am annoyed at even the interruption of needing to use the bathroom. — Jeannie Davide-Rivera