Presences Quotes & Sayings

I mean that certain fictions, chiefly Conan Doyle, Stevenson, but many others also, laid out a template that was more powerful than any local documentary account - the presences that they created, or "figures" if you prefer it, like Rabbi Loew's Golem, became too much and too fast to be contained within the conventional limits of that fiction. They got out into the stream of time, the ether; they escaped into the labyrinth. They achieved an independent existence.
The writers were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present. They got in on the curve of time, so that by writing, by holding off the inhibiting reflex of the rational mind, they were able to propose a text that was prophetic. — Iain Sinclair

This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences — Azar Nafisi

A plague of ennui afflicted London's many prophets. Warning signs were discarded, pamphlets pulped, megaphones thrown into cupboards. Those who could count questionable presences insisted that even since the Architeuthis had disappeared, something new had been walking. Something driven and intense and intent on itself. And since shortly after that, it had unfolded again and become something a little more itself, emerged from a pupa of unspecificity
into sentience, a obsessive moment of now that trod heavy in time.
No, they didn't really know what that mean, either, but that was their very strong impression. And it was freaking them out. — China Mieville

The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride. — Virginia Woolf

Don't run, child! You'll never escape the two most important presences in the life of any human being: God and death. God accompanies your every step and will be annoyed because he can see that you're not paying attention to the miracle of life. Or indeed death. You just ran past a corpse and didn't even notice. — Paulo Coelho

What is going on inside me I cannot tell. In the sky a thousand stars are magnetized, and I lie glued by the swing of the planet to the sand. A different weight brings me back to myself. I feel the weight of my body drawing me towards so many things. My dreams are more real than these dunes, than that moon, than these presences. My civilization is an empire more imperious than this empire. The marvel of a house is not that it shelters or warms a man, nor that its walls belong to him. It is that it leaves its trace on the language. Let it remain a sign. Let it form, deep in the heart, that obscure range from which, as waters from a spring, are born our dreams. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences. — Octavio Paz

The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and sleep with its healing, brilliantly detailed fictions pour in upon the jittery spirit. Falling asleep is a study in trust. Likewise, religion tries to put as ease with the world. Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises-a mother speaking downstairs. We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods. — John Updike

I've always admired people with really strong presences and felt that caring about the visual component of what you do is not intrinsically superficial or vain. — Dee Dee Ramone

I believe in the gods; or rather I believe that I believe in the gods. But I don't believe that they are great brooding presences watching over us; I believe they are completely absent minded. — Jean Giraudoux

I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other. — T. S. Eliot

Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear. — May Sarton

Going home at night! It wasn't often that I was on the river at night. I never liked it. I never felt in control. In the darkness of river and forest you could be sure only of what you could see - and even on a moonlight night you couldn't see much. When you made a noise - dipped a paddle in the water - you heard yourself as though you were another person. The river and the forest were like presences, and much more powerful than you. You felt unprotected, an intruder ... You felt the land taking you back to something that was familiar, something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there. You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always. — V.S. Naipaul

One of the unexpected and wonderfully fair things I have learned in my career is that if Hollywood were filled just with perfect-looking people, then soap operas would be the most-watched things in the world. But they're not. Looks are great, but they're not compelling enough. I've noticed that successful actors with long careers are usually talented actors with charismatic screen presences, and all of them exude one thing: confidence. — Mindy Kaling

It was the absences that had made her think, not the presences. — Nick Hornby

When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die ... they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments. — May Sarton

You can't get a guarantee from everyone who appears in personal photographs that they will forever remain warm presences in one's life or sweet memories. — Emily Yoffe

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
I lie in bed beside my little sister, listening to the singing in the yard. Life is transformed, by these voices, by these presences, by their high spirits and grand esteem, for themselves and each other. My parents, all of us, are on holiday. The mixture of voices and words is so complicated and varied it seems that such confusion, such jolly rivalry, will go on forever, and then to my surprise - for I am surprised, even though I know the pattern of rounds - the song is thinning out, you can hear the two voices striving.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
Then the one voice alone, one of them singing on, gamely, to the finish. One voice in which there is an unexpected note of entreaty, of warning, as it hangs the five separate words on the air. Life is. Wait. But a. Now, wait. Dream. — Alice Munro

It is a good idea to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought. — James Douglas

The guitar filled with rain, rain softened the paper sacks, the sacks split and perfume spilled on the pavement, pearls rolled in the gutter: while the wind pushed and the cat scratched, the cat screamed
but worse, I was frightened, a coward to equal Jose: those storming streets seemed aswarm with unseen presences waiting to trap, imprison me for aiding an outlaw. — Truman Capote

Tirelessly they flew on and on, and tirelessly she kept pace. She felt a fierce joy possessing her, that she could command these immortal presences. And she rejoiced in her blood and flesh, in the rough pine bark she felt next to her skin, in the beat of her heart and the life of all her senses, and in the hunger she was feeling now, and in the presence of her sweet-voiced bluethroat daemon, and in the earth below her and the lives of every creature, plant and animal both; and she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her. — Philip Pullman

We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but able still to love. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us.
This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway. — China Mieville

Some ghosts or felt presences may simply be the essence of another living person projected outward while sleeping. — Doug Dillon

It's possible that the reason I've never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren't wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwithstanding) and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to "presences" picking up something real that the rest of us can't pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the lawn outside my office. — Mary Roach

The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver ... Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother. — Louise Bourgeois

Do you not feel', said the Doctor in his very soft but still crisp-edged voice, 'that invisible presences have more reality than visible ones? They exert more influence upon us. They make us cry more easily. — Angela Carter

She told him of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad not-truths, even, but he nodded, and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of the story is always an absence and he wanted to live among presences. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Adam Nicolson has written of the 'powerful absence[s]' that remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. These, perhaps, are the landscapes in which we live the longest,warped though they are by time and abraded though they are by distance — Robert Macfarlane

A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.
The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names
Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren't people. They don't love and hate, they aren't for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The things that stayed were things that didn't matter except they stayed, night and day, all seasons the same, and were peaceful to a fault and boded no ill but thought well enough of themselves to repeat their presences. — William H Gass

Listen to presences inside poems,
Let them take you where they will.
Follow those private hints,
and never leave the premises. — Rumi

People have presences, both online and in real life. You can choose to show everything, meaning all sides of you, or you can choose to be selective. — Kevin Systrom

The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars ... I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world.
I knew I had come there out of kindness, theirs and mine. The grief that came to me then was nothing like the grief I had felt for myself alone ... This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way it added to me what I had lost. I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come. — Wendell Berry

I sense Light as the giver of all presences, and material as spent Light. What is made by Light casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light. — Louis Kahn

Listen to presences inside poems. — Rumi

The EU should have consolidated its different presences and purposes in Kosovo earlier. — Emma Bonino

Xypher flashed himself into Simone's bedroom, expecting to find her there.
It was empty.
Closing his eyes, he sensed for presences in the condo. There no Simone, but Jesse and Gloria in Jesse's room.
Without thinking, he flashed in there to find the two ghosts naked on the bed. "Oh g-ds, I'm blind." He spun around to give them his back.
"Don't you knock?" Jesse said. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure
as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been. Dim presences gathered at the edge of his consciousness; he could not see them, but he knew that they were there, gathering their forces toward a kind of palpability he could not see or hear. He was approaching them, he knew; but there was no need to hurry. He could ignore them if he wished; he had all the time there was.
There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been. — John Edward Williams

He was riding back through a doorway in time to a place that had nothing to do with the airplanes, and motorized vehicle and telephones wires, and radios that surrounded him now ... The woods in late autumn had become his private sun dappled cathedral, one that contained presences antithetical to the conventional notion of a church. — James Lee Burke

I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being. — D.H. Lawrence

The extent to which we live from day to day, from week to week, intent on details and oblivious to larger presences, is a gauge of our impoverishment in time. — Robert Grudin

[Judith Shakespeare] lives in you and in me [ ... ] she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. — Virginia Woolf

To a person who loves, is not absence the most certain, the most effective, the most durable, the most indestructible, the most faithful of presences? — Marcel Proust

Under the mystichood ofNameless Bride, we grope in Her Sacred Darkness for plasmatic encounter, the fifth ionized state of matter. Our mundane sight of differentation and separation recedes into the magickal Abyss of Blackness where all is touch. We feel each other as tactile presences whose extended dimension stretches to the stars only to coalesce beyond galactic expanses in the white and worm-holes of Her ever spiraling Gown of Worlds beyond Worlds. Let us feel Her concrescence as we stroke each unique form in the unfathomable dimensions of Her perfect formfulness - ever-changing, ever-new, ever-variable in the rainbow myriads of infinite spasms of delight. — Lady Svetlana

When I was a child and heard about angels, I was both frightened and fascinated by the thought of these enormous, invisible presences in our midst. I conceived of them not as white-robed androgynes with yellow locks and thick gold wings, which was how my friend Matty Wilson had described them to me
Matty was the predecessor of all sorts of arcane knowledge
but as big, dark, blundering men, massive in their weightlessness, given to pranks and ponderous play, who might knock you over, or break you in half, without meaning to. When a child from Miss Molyneaux's infant school in Carrickdrum fell under the hoofs of a dray-horse one day and was trampled to death, I, a watchful six year old, knew who was to blame; I pictured his guardian angel standing over the child's crushed form with his big hands helplessly extended, not sure whether to be contrite or to laugh. — John Banville

The truth is, those people we feel drawn to most might not be intended as love interests, but rather as life-changing, life-altering presences that come into our lives for reasons we can't yet understand. — Tonya Hurley

When God's children pass under the shadow of the cross of Calvary, they know that through that shadow lies their passage to the great white throne. For them Gethsemane is as paradise. God fills it with sacred presences; its solemn silence is broken by the music of tender promises, its awful darkness softened and brightened by the sunlight of Heavenly faces and the music of angel wings. — Frederic Farrar

However grand our sacramental downsittings and updressings may be, they remain only and precisely sacraments: real presences, under particular signs, of the happier order that faith can discover under any and all signs. They're a bit like the church. As long as we see them as an earnest of the kingdom, they're all right; when we put on airs and act as if they were the kingdom itself, they look just silly. — Robert Farrar Capon

Now Gansey grinned, the warmth of discovery starting to course through him. "So, pop quiz, Mr Parrish. Three things that appear in the vicinity of ley lines?"
"Black dogs," Adam said indulgently. "Demonic presences."
"Camaros," Ronan inserted.
Gansey continued as if he hadn't spoken. "And ghosts. Ronan, queue up the evidence if you would. — Maggie Stiefvater

'Zeal' is essentially a compromising devotion to God, a commitment to cleansing the Holy Land of all foreign and pagan presences and to re-establish the kingdom of David as God had intended. — Reza Aslan

My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience. — Jennifer Egan

And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s. — Thomas Keneally

An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook. Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their designs, such as comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.
Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources. — Jaron Lanier

Here are the bills again, I always dread them a little. They are familiar presences: first in the mail box, then in the bill drawer, now on the desk. Services Rendered. "My life is dependent on services rendered." — Gunilla Brodde Norris

Then again, as those who suffer from it know, intractable depression creates a planet all its own, largely impermeable to influence from others except as shadow presences, urging you to come out and rejoin the world, take in a movie, go out for a bite, cheer up. — Daphne Merkin

So, pop quiz, Mr. Parrish. Three things that appear in the vicinity of ley lines?" "Black dogs," Adam said indulgently. "Demonic presences." "Camaros," Ronan inserted. — Maggie Stiefvater

He was as inexpressive as he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose silence is an interruption. — Edith Wharton

These stories have a dark side. Outsiders and eccentrics are regarded with suspicion, tortured, even killed. The major theme that emerges is of families diminished by conflict; almost a generation of adult males appears to be missing. Their absence is balanced by a number of strong female presences. This also reflects the dominance of women in the Acehnese household.

Azhari is a master of suspense. He wastes no words; his narration is sparse. The overall atmosphere of the stories in Nutmeg Woman is tense and anxious. If there is a message, it is a plea for peace and tolerance and an end to bloodshed and oppression. — Heather Curnow

The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year. — Henry Beston

That the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact ... they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated ... — Jane Jacobs

THE SUN CAME UP a baleful smear in the sky, not quite shapeless, in fact able to assume the appearance of a device immediately recognizable yet unnamable, so widely familiar that the inability to name it passed from simple frustration to a felt dread, whose intricacy deepened almost moment to moment . . . its name a word of power, not to be spoken aloud, not even to be remembered in silence. All around lay ambushes of the bad ice, latent presences, haunting all transaction, each like the infinitesimal circle converging toward zero that mathematicians now and then find use for. A silver-gray, odorless, silent exit from the upper world. . . . The sun might be visible from time to time, with or without clouds, but the sky was more neutral-density gray than blue. Out on the promontory grew some even-textured foliage, in this light a blazing, virtually shadowless green, and breaking down at the base of the headland was the sea-green sea, the ice-green, glass-green sea. Hunter — Thomas Pynchon

Premonitions, presentiments, the sensing of unseen presences and many allied experiences are due to the activity of the astral body and its reaction on the physical; their ever-increasing frequency is merely the result of its evolution among educated people. — Annie Besant

You know you've found love when they have: a smile that melts you, an innocence that soothes, a presences that glows and a trust in them that grows. - For Lydia — Kieran Harper

That's what all painting is about, its space and light occupied by human presences. — Leon Kossoff

I think there are presences out there that we can't see or directly communicate with that have benevolent influence on us. Whether they're angels or something else, I'm not sure. — Misha Collins

All those invisible presences ... began to transform themselves into companions that were more or less volatile, more or less intense, companions that I'd have to learn to live with. They invaded my mind when I was alone, in the silent evenings toiling away in the workshop between patterns and bastings, when I went to bed or in the gloom of the living room ... — Maria Duenas

How, when she showed no desire to understand, could I explain to her what the act of worship meant to me; or how many unseen presences thronged the pews around me, who down the centuries had all shared my belief and prayed as I did; or how those sixty minutes of service constituted the one hour when I could be sure of communing with my late father and mother? — Magda Szabo