Window Of The Mind Quotes & Sayings

What I know about living is the pain is never just ours
Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo
So I keep a listening to the moment the grief becomes a window
When I can see what I couldn't see before,
through the glass of my most battered dream, I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind
and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds.
So the next time I tell you how easily I come out of my skin, don't try to put me back in
just say here we are together at the window aching for it to all get better — Andrea Gibson

He loved her eyes. They were always changing, and Lucas liked to catalogue all their different colors in his mind. When she laughed, her eyes were pale amber, like honey sitting in a glass jar on a sunny window. When he kissed her, they darkened until they were the rich color of mahogany leather, but with strips of red and gold thread shot through. Right now they were turning dark - inviting him to lower his lips to hers. — Josephine Angelini

More than once, the broken moon would cast through the window a silver light and remind me of independent events yielding to their own momentum and interacting under natural laws while my mind would impose happiness, grief, beauty, ruin, justice and chaos. — Leonard Seet

Just as television didn't put an end to radio or the movies (to say nothing of books), I don't think e-books will put an end to hard copies, even for someone like me who loves technology and does not fetishize the physical medium of books. ~ Steven Pinker, author of The Lauguage Instinct, How the Mind Works The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. — Leah Price

This country life doesn't look so bad from the window. It melts your heart. It warms your soul.lets you think about the possibility of quiet and how quiet is beautiful when seen through the proper lenses and mind-set. — Jason Myers

Open the window of your mind. Allow the fresh air,new lights and new truths to enter. — Amit Ray

Most of the note-taking happens while I'm watching television. It's a broad window on the world, and a lot of things are already established in my mind as things I say, things that I'm interested in, things that are fodder for my [stand-up] machine. And when I see something that relates to one of them, I know it instantly and if it's a further exaggeration and a further addition, or an exception - if it plays into furthering my purpose, I jot it down. — George Carlin

Another hour of strained silence passed. Hawk left to speak with an aquaintance in another car.
"Would you like to tell me about it?" James offered as soon as his friend was out of earshot.
Mandy looked out the window, shamefaced. "I'd really rather not discuss it, if you don't mind."
"You know, even if he is a friend, I'd be happy to black his eye if-"
"No!"
"Whatever you say." He sighed resignedly, leaning back against the tapestry seats. — Kat Martin

Nowhere can I think so happily as in a train. I am not inspired; nothing so uncomfortable as that. I am never seized with a sudden idea for a masterpiece, nor form a sudden plan for some new enterprise. My thoughts are just pleasantly reflective. I think of all the good deeds I have done, and (when these give out) of all the good deeds I am going to do. I look out of the window and say lazily to myself, "How jolly to live there"; and a little farther on, "How jolly not to live there." I see a cow, and I wonder what it is like to be a cow, and I wonder whether the cow wonders what it is to be like me; and perhaps, by this time, we have passed on to a sheep, and I wonder if it is more fun being a sheep. My mind wanders on in a way which would annoy Pelman a good deal, but it wanders on quite happily, and the "clankety-clank" of the train adds a very soothing accompaniment. So soothing, indeed, that at any moment I can close my eyes and pass into a pleasant state of sleep. — A.A. Milne

Adam, we hear, walked in easy fellowship with God in the cool of the evening and spoke to him as to a friend. This ordering of Adam to God meant that our first parent was effortlessly caught up in adoration. The term "adoration" comes from the Latin ado ratio, which in turn is derived from "ad ora" (to the mouth). To adore, therefore, is to be mouth to mouth with God, properly aligned to the divine source, breathing in God's life. When one is in the stance of adoration, the whole of one's life - mind, will, emotions, imagination, sexuality - becomes ordered and harmonized, much as the elements of a rose window arrange themselves musically around a central point. — Robert E. Barron

There I sat, probably looking so dreadful that nothing had the courage to stand by me; not even the candle, which I had just done the service of lighting it, would have anything to do with me. It burned away there by itself, as in an empty room. My last hope was always the window. I imagined that outside there, there still might be something that belonged to me, even now, even in this sudden poverty of dying. But scarcely had I looked thither when I wished the window had been barricaded, blocked up, like the wall. For now I knew that things were going on out there in the same indifferent way, that out there, too, there was nothing but my loneliness. The loneliness I had brought upon myself and to the greatness of which my heart no longer stood in any sort of proportion. People came to my mind whom I had once left, and I did not understand how one could forsake people. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Lao-tzu advised, "As soon as you have a thought, laugh at it," because reality is not what we think. We perceive the world through a window colored by beliefs, interpretations, and associations. We see things not as they are but as we are. The same brain that enables us to contemplate philosophy, solve math equations, and create poetry also generates a stream of static known as discursive thoughts, which seem to arise at random, bubbling up into our awareness. Such mental noise is a natural phenomenon, no more of a problem than the dreams that appear in the sleep state. Therefore, our schooling aims not to struggle with random thoughts but to transcend them in the present moment, where no thoughts exist, only awareness. Our mind's liberation awaits not in some imagined future but here and now. — Dan Millman

The ocean pulsed outside our window. The sound of the waves crashing on the rocks below usually calmed me down, but the fear and chaos that were tangled in my mind made that an impossibility. — Chelsie Shakespeare

The ragged curtains were reaching out across the room and the foot of the bed was soaked with rain. She got up and closed the window to protect her from the storm outside. However, there was no protection from the storm that was always brewing in her mind. — Nancy B. Brewer

His hand sliced through the air in a silencing motion, and he stalked to the window. "Have you seen any rats?"
Her mind spun at the sudden shift of subject. "Rats?"
"Rodents that resemble large mice."
"I know what rats are," she gritted out. "Why?"
"They're spies." He peered through the curtain into the darkness. Thick fog diffused the yellow lamplight, creating an eerie glow on the street below. "Have you seen any?"
Rodent spies? The man might be hot as hell, but he was a loon. As inconspicuously as possible, Cara inched toward the door. "I didn't see any furry little James Bonds. — Larissa Ione

Fat bed, lick the black cat in my mouth
each morning. Unfasten all the bones

that make a head, and let me rest: unknown
among the oboe-throated geese gone south

to drop their down and sleep beside the out-
bound tides. Now there's no nighttime I can own

that isn't anxious as a phone
about to ring. Give me some doubt

on loan; give me a way to get away
from what I know. I pace until the sun

is in my window. I lie down. I'm a coal:
I smolder to a bloodshot glow. Each day

I die down in my bed of snow, undone
by my red mind and what it woke. — Malachi Black

You have not slept for many days together, Legna. Why do you assume you might have success today?
Legna turned around sharply, driving her gaze and attention out the window, trying to use the sprawling lawn as a slate with which to fill her mind. Mind Demon he was not, but she knew he was capable of seeing far enough into her emotional state by just monitoring her physiological reactions to his observations. Legna bit her lip hard, furious that she should feel like the child he always referred to her as in their conversations. Young one, indeed. How would he like it if she referred to him as a decrepit old buzzard? — Jacquelyn Frank

I was his "little girl with the William Burroughs mind," his "secret fairy," "female Frank Zappa" and "window onto a magical world." He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams. — Jalina Mhyana

What you really want for yourself is always trying to break through, just as a cooling breeze flows through an open window on a hot day. Your part is to open the windows of your mind. — Vernon Howard

Chapter One: Lady Maitland England, 1793 The Earl of Warren let his mind drift as his younger sister rambled on in a cheerful voice. Wilhelmina - or Minette, as everyone called her - could carry on a conversation for hours, no matter if the other person participated in the exchange. He had the questionable fortune to be sharing a carriage with her on a day-long journey to a friend's home in Hertfordshire. "Will we be there soon?" Minette perched on the edge of her seat, craning to look out the window. — Annabel Joseph

I was just sitting on the train, just staring out the window at some cows. It was not the most inspiring subject. When all of a sudden the idea of Harry just appeared in my mind's eye. — J.K. Rowling

To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish. — Fernando Pessoa

BEANNACHT For Josie On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you. And when your eyes freeze behind the gray window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colors, indigo, red, green and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight. When the canvas frays in the curach of thought and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you, may there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home. May the nourishment of the earth be yours, may the clarity of light be yours, may the fluency of the ocean be yours, may the protection of the ancestors be yours. And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life. — John O'Donohue

I was going to suggest some hard-won guidelines for responsible reviewing. For instance: First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom. — John Leonard

The ticking was gone from my mind and all was quiet everywhere in the world and I held the curtain like I held the sound of the bullets going into the draft horse, his favourite, in the barn, one two three, and I stood at the window in Stevie's jacket and looked and waited and still the rain kept coming down outside one two three and I was thinking oh what a small sky for so much rain. — Colum McCann

blood from the gash had seeped through her shirt and the blanket, pooling on the floor. Looking at it intensified the dizziness that its loss had caused. With the most pressing of her concerns attended to, Myranda set her mind to the task of escaping. She assessed the situation. Of course, her pack was gone. A pull on the door revealed it to be solidly secured from the outside. The windows were all small and near to the high ceiling. There would be no escape through any of those. The sole window large enough to allow her to escape was the shattered stained glass window behind the pulpit, but it was even further out of her reach. She had to try the door — Joseph R. Lallo

The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the Toyota's headlights. The body could drive, I told myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind's eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already thinking of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images, glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota's slipstream. — William Gibson

Through the window of my soul and the mirror of my mind, I was looking for the beauty of my life. I could not find it, but I found it in the glint of a dew drop at the edge of a dancing leaf. — Debasish Mridha

In your bed tonight, turn off all of the lights and make sure that there is no noise. There is something that you will hear. It is probably that branch slapping the window but you better believe that your mind is going to go to some sick individual tapping on the glass because he wants to get your attention to come to the window for when you do you will be grabbed through it and pulled outside. That happens to me all of the time. — Marcus Dunstan

Knowledge, then, can be dangerous because a rational mind may be compelled to use it in rational ways, allowing malevolent or careless speakers to commandeer our faculties against us. This makes the expressive power of language a mixed blessing: it lets us learn what we want to know, but it also lets us learn what we don't want to know. Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world. It's not surprising that we expect people to sheathe their words in politeness and innuendo and other forms of doublespeak. — Steven Pinker

Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind. — Matt Haig

Education is important not because it helps you to get a job, but because it opens the window of the mind through which we can see the beauty of life. — Debasish Mridha

The strip of earthy, faintly visible outside the window, was running faster now, blending into a gray stream. Through the dry phrases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action. — Ayn Rand

I can't be the only insomniac who has looked out his living room window and thought, "Why don't we all get together? We're awake. We could swap sleep recipes, console each other, plot terrible crimes." But it won't happen, any gathering of the near-dead, because the only thing more abhorrent to a restless mind in the ugly hours than the actual harshness of the ugly hours is the thought of having to listen to somebody else. Somebody else in distress, also angry at the comfortable world. — RM Vaughan

Baby's World
I wish I could take a quiet corner in the heart of my baby's very
own world.
I know it has stars that talk to him, and a sky that stoops
down to his face to amuse him with its silly clouds and rainbows.
Those who make believe to be dumb, and look as if they never
could move, come creeping to his window with their stories and with
trays crowded with bright toys.
I wish I could travel by the road that crosses baby's mind,
and out beyond all bounds;
Where messengers run errands for no cause between the kingdoms
of kings of no history;
Where Reason makes kites of her laws and flies them, the Truth
sets Fact free from its fetters. — Rabindranath Tagore

The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity ... I built a temple in my head ... Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain. — Lisa St. Aubin De Teran

Men who have not been violated don't understand what it is like to have the edges of your body blurred - to feel that every inch of your skin is a place where fingers can press, that every hole and orifice is a place where others can put parts of their bodies. When your body stops being corporeal, your soul has no place to go, so it finds the next window to escape.
My soul left me when I was six. It flew away past a flapping curtain over a window. I ran after it, but it never came back. It left me alone on wet stinking mattresses. It left me alone in the choking dark. It took my tongue, my heart, and my mind.
When you don't have a soul, the ideas inside you become terrible things. They grow unchecked, like malignant monsters. You cry in the night because you know the ideas are wrong - you know because people have told you that - and yet none of it does any good. The ideas are free to grow. There is no soul inside you to stop them. — Rene Denfeld

Shopping malls rarely have any windows on the outside. There is a good reason for this: if you could see the world beyond the window you would be able to orientate yourself and might not get lost. Shopping malls have maps that are unreadable even to the most skilled cartographer. There is a good reason for this: if you could read the map you would be able to find your way to the shop you meant to go without getting lost. Shopping malls look rather the same whichever way you turn. There is a reason for this too: shopping malls are built to disorientate you, to spin you around, to free you from the original petty purpose for which you came and make you wander like Cain past rows and rows of shops thinking to yourself, "Ooh! I should actually go in there and get something. Might as well seeing as I'm here." And this strange mental process, this freeing of the mind from all sense of purpose or reason, is known to retail analysts as the Gruen transfer. — Mark Forsyth

I never felt my Mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment - upon no person but you. When you are in the room my thoughts never fly out of window: you always concentrate my whole senses. — John Keats

Life has dazzling beauty. To see it, open the window of the mind and remove the curtain of conformity. — Debasish Mridha

Astrid looked at Lana, now leaning against the window, and Diana, lost in thought, and reminded herself that at times she had hated Diana. She had told Sam to kill her if necessary. And she had disliked Lana as a short-tempered bitch who sometimes abused her privileges.
She let her mind move beyond these two. Orc, who had been the first to kill in the FAYZ, the first murderer. A vicious drunk. But someone who had died a hero.
Mary. Mother Mary. A saint who had died trying to murder the children she cared for.
Quinn, who had been a faithless worm at the start and had been a pillar at the end.
Albert. She still didn't know quite what to think of Albert, but it was undeniable that far fewer would have walked out of the FAYZ without Albert.
If her own feelings were this conflicted, was it any wonder the rest of the world didn't know what to do with the Perdido survivors? — Michael Grant

There was an idea that God created man different from other animals, because man was rational and animals had drives and instincts. That idea of a rational man that was specially created went out the window when Darwin showed that we evolved from animal ancestors, that we have instincts, much as do animals, and that our instincts are very important. It was a much more sophisticated, nuanced, and rich view of the human mind. — Eric Kandel

It was snowing. In the lamplight, blades of ice were growing on the outside of the blue-tinged window-panes and the hoarfroast, like melted sugar, glittered on the gold-spangled bottle-glass of the windows. Absolute silence enveloped the little house as it slumbered in the shadows.
Des Esseintes let his mind wander ... Like some great hanging of reverse ermine, the sky rose before him, black and dappled with white. An icy wind gusted, intensifying the wild scudding of the snow, inverting the proportions of black and white. The heraldic hanging of the sky turned itself over, becoming true white ermine, itself dappled with black by the tiny patches of night strewn among the snowflakes. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Having fun?" said George.
"Yes, Mr Lane," said Dinkesh. "Kenny has just flown out of the window."
"That's nice," said George, banishing from his mind the thought that children as young as Kenny and Dinkesh would be daft enough to take drugs in their bedrooms. — Mark Gorton

Imagination, then, must be the flip side of memory, not so much a calling up as a calling forth. Yet imagination also relies on knowledge: on knowing what is - and is not - possible in this world of fact. Imagination plants the seed or buries the bulb knowing the seasons will shift, seeing, in the mind's eye, April give way to August, the azalea to the rose, knowing that the red leaves of the maple will burnish in autumn, knowing that from this exact window, one can look down to the inlet where the moon's reflection will be just another shimmering white blossom. — Judith Kitchen

When you're home or you're working, your mind just isn't allowed to just roll on like it does when you're watching the scenery go by. You're hurdling through space but you're not really moving ... It's that dreaminess, that ability to just get dreamy while you're looking out the window and you see something ... and it makes you think of something else, and all of a sudden the words are just flowing out of you. — Pegi Young

On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping. — Sylvia Plath

We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light. — Virginia Woolf

When Love comes suddenly and taps
on your window, run and let it in but first
shut the door of your reason.
Even the smallest hint chases love away
like smoke that drowns the freshness
of the morning breeze.
To reason Love can only say,
the way is barred, you can't pass through
but to the lover it offers a hundred blessings.
Before the mind decides to take a step
Love has reached the seventh heaven.
Before the mind can figure how
Love has climbed the Holy Mountain.
I must stop this talk now and let
Love speak from its nest of silence. — Rumi

Through your ideas, you open the window of your mind and say a hello to the world. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I have discovered," he said to Charles Dewy, "that when a man marries, peace of mind and freedom go out of the window."
"Well, old boy," said Charles comfortably, "that's the price we have to pay for having company in our old age and for ensuring that we have heirs to follow us. — Colleen McCullough

I shake my head, turn from the window, clear my mind of thoughts of a hundred years away. — Haruki Murakami

Mary watched the sunset from her carriage window, realizing that such beauty could never last. Life was a golden glory that faded in the wink of an eye. Life was a village fair that only lasted for a single day. As the carriage rattled along, rocking her like a babe in arms, Mary felt very old and wise. She found that she didn't mind being taken back to the castle, to a caring captivity that was filled with comforts and kindness. And she also found that she couldn't keep her eyes open. — Margaret George

Keep the window of the mind open to let the fresh thoughts come in like fresh air. — Debasish Mridha

When she sat down on the tile next to him, unafraid, his kaleidoscope senses drank in the years that had been printed onto her mind before she was old enough to remember, and he told her a story, projecting into her darkness sensations of light and color and shape, butterflies swirling like silk-spun gold out through a window that opened to a big green field in the days before the bomb. — Mel Paisley

(It starts with)
One thing, I don't know why
It doesn't even matter how hard you try
Keep that in mind, I designed this rhyme
To explain in due time
All I know
time is a valuable thing
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings
Watch it count down to the end of the day
The clock ticks life away
It's so unreal
Didn't look out below
Watch the time go right out the window
Trying to hold on but didn't even know
Wasted it all just to
Watch you go
I kept everything inside and even though I tried, it all fell apart
What it meant to me will eventually be a memory of a time when I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn't even matter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn't even matter — Linkin Park

If I make my window ten days for stand-up, the conclusion is that I failed and that I'm not good at stand-up. If I make it ten years - if I just wait - the conclusion might be something totally different. I think it's so cool to do things in which you discover the malleability of your own mind. — Demetri Martin

Hold on a minute." She leaned out the window, shouted at the messenger who'd nearly sideswiped her vehicle with his jet-board. "Police property, asshole. If I had time I'd hunt you down and use that board to beat your balls black."
"Darling Eve, you know how that kind of talk thrills and excites me. How can I keep my mind off sex now? — J.D. Robb

Wordlessly they settled on a third-story ledge near Patriarch's Pond, of the roof across from Luce's window, where they used to watch her sleep. The memory would be fresher in Daniil's mind, but the faint recollection of Luce lying dreaming under the covers still sent a warm rush across Daniel's wings.
Both were somber.In the bombed-out city, it was sad and ironic that her building had been spared when she hadn't. They stood in silence in the cold night,both carefully tucking back their wings so that they wouldn't accidentially touch. — Lauren Kate

Now that they were in the light, they were transparent
fully transparent when they stood between me and it, smudgy and imperfectly opaque when they stood in the shadow of some tree. They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air. One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane. I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed.
then some re-adjustment of the mind or some focussing of my eyes took place, and I saw the whole phenomenon the other way round. The men were as they always had been; as all the men I had known had been perhaps. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men are ghosts by comparison. — C.S. Lewis

He moved into the left lane, rolled down his window, and tossed all of Alessandra's new clothes and her shoe out of the car. "Oh, my God!" She spun in her seat, watching as her clothes hit the ground seventy-five miles an hour, getting caught in the brush. "Oh, my God!" She stared at him, aghast. "Why did you do that? Are you completely out of your mind? — Suzanne Brockmann

I wasn't lonely. Loneliness, I think, has very little to do with location. It's a state of mind. In the centre of every city are some of the loneliest people in the world. If anything, because our whole planet was just outside the window, I felt even more aware of and connected to the seven billion other people who call it home. — Chris Hadfield

Before I came to New York, I only had a few pictures of the city in my mind. And you know 'That Girl?' Marlo Thomas jumping with her hat? I always loved that, and I wondered what that double street she crosses is. And it's Park Avenue! And that's what I can see out my window. — Kate Spade

Quiet pragmatism, of course, lacks the romance of vocal militancy. But I felt myself more a mediator than a crusader. My strengths were reasoning, crafting compromises, finding the good and the good faith on both sides of an argument, and using that to build a bridge. Always, my first question was, what's the goal? And then, who must be persuaded if it is to be accomplished? A respectful dialogue with one's opponent almost invariably goes further than a harangue outside his or her window. If you want to change someone's mind, you must understand what need shapes his or her opinion. To prevail, you must first listen. — Sonia Sotomayor

My mind still buzzed with the cares of a busy day; I sat on without noting how twilight
was deepening into dark.
Suddenly light stirred across the gloom and touched me as with a finger.
I lifted my head and met the gaze of the full moon widened in wonder like a child's. It held my eyes for long, and I felt as though a love-letter had been secretly dropped in at my window.
And ever since my heart is breaking to write for answer something fragrant as Night's unseen flowers - great as her declaration spelt out in nameless stars. — Rabindranath Tagore

She went to the window. A fine sheen of sugary frost covered everything in sight, and white smoke rose from chimneys in the valley below the resort town. The window opened to a rush of sharp early November air that would have the town in a flurry of activity, anticipating the tourists the colder weather always brought to the high mountains of North Carolina.
She stuck her head out and took a deep breath. If she could eat the cold air, she would. She thought cold snaps were like cookies, like gingersnaps. In her mind they were made with white chocolate chunks and had a cool, brittle vanilla frosting. They melted like snow in her mouth, turning creamy and warm. — Sarah Addison Allen

The last dying days of summer, fall coming on fast. A cold night, the first of the season, a change from the usual bland Maryland climate. Cold, thought the boy; his mind felt numb. The trees he could see through his bedroom window were tall charcoal sticks, shivering, afraid of the wind or only trying to stand against it. Every tree was alone out there. The animals were alone, each in its hole, in its thin fur, and anything that got hit on the road tonight would die alone. Before morning, he thought, its blood would freeze in the cracks of the asphalt. — Poppy Z. Brite

Loneliness ... has very little to do with location. It's a state of mind. In the centre of every city are some of the loneliest people in the world ... because our whole planet was just outside the window, I felt even more ... connected to the seven billion other people ... — Chris Hadfield

The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window. — Steven Pinker

So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof, a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, 'This is he,' or, 'This is she. — Virginia Woolf

For me, life has always been the storm. The storm and watching from the window for the thing that could stop it, even if my watching was only with my mind's eye locked on the window of my imagination. — Sarah Pinborough

I have seen many people, who, while you are speaking to them, instead of looking at, and attending to you, fix their eyes upon theceiling, or some other part of the room, look out of the window, play with a dog, twirl their snuff-box, or pick their nose. Nothing discovers a little, futile, frivolous mind more than this, and nothing is so offensively ill-bred. — Lord Chesterfield

From the highest state of mind you have a window whereby you could perhaps move beyond all states of mind, to enlightenment. — Frederick Lenz

We need to get you laid."
Despite the fact she couldn't see my face, my brow furrowed. "How is that going to help?"
"Rebound sex is exactly what you need right now, sweaty, dirty, work-your-frustration-out sex. In fact, I have the perfect guy in mind - "
I jolted up quickly at the sound of a firm tapping. I looked over at the window to see Kacey's sun kissed face, his shades resting at the edge of his long nose, baby blue eyes fixed on me.
I placed my hand over my thumping heart. "You ass."
"Bitch?"
"Not you, Jayne." I climbed off my bed. "Kay and Ty are here."
"Speak of the devil, and his sexy ass will most definitely appear. — Elizabeth Morgan

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark. — Wallace Stegner

With every line he teaches her, the world grows a little wider. She had never known before how words could sing,how a turn of phrase could unlock a window in her mind. — Rosamund Hodge

The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were floating like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves. "And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves." She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things. — Virginia Woolf

I realized that most thoughts are impersonal happenings, like self-assembling machines. Unless we train ourselves, the thoughts passing through our mind have little involvement with our will. It is strange to realize that even our own thoughts pass by like scenery out the window of a bus, a bus we took by accident while trying to get somewhere else. — Daniel Pinchbeck

Our desire to segregate the mind's cogitations from the body's exertions reflects the grip that Cartesian dualism still holds on us. When we think about thinking, we're quick to locate our mind, and hence our self, in the gray matter inside our skull and to see the rest of the body as a mechanical life-support system that keeps the neural circuits charged. More than a fancy of philosophers like Descartes and his predecessor Plato, this dualistic view of mind and body as operating in isolation from each other appears to be a side effect of consciousness itself. Even though the bulk of the mind's work goes on behind the scenes, in the shadows of the unconscious, we're aware only of the small but brightly lit window that the conscious mind opens for us. And our conscious mind tells us, insistently, that it's separate from the body. — Nicholas Carr

Sitting on the train I watch the scenery speeding by, notice a cobweb in the top corner of the window, undulating with a gentle breeze I can't feel. I lean back in my seat and take my book out of the carrier bag. Turning it over in my hand, it feels warm. It feels how I want to feel; full of knowledge, full of the future.
The time I've spent staying in bed smoking dope I've been hibernating, recuperating and gaining strength. I'm weak socially, but being away from other drug users has made me resilient. It's allowed my mind and body to heal and mend. As if the winter is over, I've come out stronger now. I'm on my own. I have the choice of what to do with my life.
I'm going to stay clean. I'm going to be the woman I can be. — Christine Lewry

Mark felt the Berg descending. He leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes, for a moment wanting nothing but to fall asleep and never wake up again, or to do the opposite and kneel, bashing his head against the floor until it was over. But there was still that small sliver of clarity in his mind. He held on to it like a man clinging to a root on the side of a sheer cliff. Eyes open again. With a grunt, he forced himself to his feet, leaning against the window. The small city of Asheville lay spread out before them. Walls had been constructed out of wood, — James Dashner

But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16] — Michael Ondaatje

The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots. Despite her journal sketches, she no longer really believed in characters. They were quiant devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology had exposed. Plots too were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn. A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony. It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning, the sensations of a child standing at a window, the curve and dip of a swallow's flight over a pool of water. The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past. — Ian McEwan

Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The — George Orwell

Hesitantly, I touched the stump where my finger used to be. In my mind, something almost remembered itself, but the fumes of turpentine were making me a little lightheaded; whatever memory was on the verge of coughing itself up was gone even before it materialized. Out the window, I could see a squirrel was stumbling erratically around in circles underneath the old basketball net. Then I realized that it wasn't a squirrel; it was a brown paper bag. — Dan Chaon

It was a mind-blowing experience, it really was-absolutely an awesome thing ... As I got to the top I released a bag of M&Ms in the cockpit. It was amazing ... Looking out that window, seeing the white clouds in the LA Basin, it looked like snow on the ground. — Mike Melvill

And the City, in its own way, gets down for you, cooperates, smoothing its sidewalks, correcting its curbstones, offering you melons and green apples on the corner. Racks of yellow head scarves; strings of Egyptian beads. Kansas fried chicken and something with raisins call attention to an open window where the aroma seems to lurk. And if that's not enough, doors to speakeasies stand ajar and in that cool dark place a clarinet coughs and clears its throat waiting for the woman to decide on the key. She makes up her mind and as you pass by informs your back that she is daddy's little angel child. The City is smart at this: smelling and good and looking raunchy; sending secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast. And good at opening locks, dimming stairways. Covering your moans with its own. — Toni Morrison

Simon!"
The voice was Clary's. He would know it anywhere. He wondered if his mind was conjuring it up now, a sense memory of what he'd most loved during life to carry him through the process of death.
"Simon, you stupid idiot! I'm over here! At the window!"
Simon jumped to his feet. He doubted his mind would conjure that up. — Cassandra Clare

There were two kinds of storms, Alice thought. One was a friendly kind that you could enjoy watching out the window with a cup of tea. It crashed around in the sky with theatricality but no real malice.
This storm was the other, the killing kind. There are horrors that exist in the night, the bitter wind said, horrors that only children and demons can see. There are horrors that exist in the mind as well, that only the individual can bear witness to. The winter wind sang of things that the mind did not quite remember but that fear never forgot, filled as people are with the haunts and tragedies that make up the shadows of their lives. We can't endure them, the wind whispered, for when the light and warmth are truly taken we are left shivering naked in the dark. Then we hear a nearby husky chuckle that tells us we are prey. — Thea Harrison

I had recognized her. They had tried to tear her out, but she had lived in me--deep in my heart and secret, nameless and indescribable, yet never entirely gone. She had been a face in the window of every departing train, a form seen from the back on every crowded street, always just out of my sight, always turning away. And I had known her when she came to me, though I could not say it, and though the very thought had sent my mind skidding across the ice into unconsciousness. — Raphael Carter

Love's easy to learn. It's like taking a risk. You set your mind on it and refuse to be afraid, and in no time you feel terrifically exhilarated and all your inhibitions fly out of the window. — Dick Francis

What if she were simply to open her bedroom window and throw herself out, head first? Would she really be able to come back and start again? Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind? Philosophers "came to grips" with this problem a long time ago, Dr. Kellet had told her, rather wearily, it was one of the very first questions they addressed, so there was really no point in her fretting over it. But surely, by its very nature, everyone wrestled with this dilemma anew every time? — Kate Atkinson

I used to look out the window of my bedroom as a kid, and there were these stars that, in my mind, made a big "A" in the sky. I thought my destiny was to go there. — Helen Mirren

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust. — Henry David Thoreau

[Magic] can guide people to the very edge of reason - and then push them off. Thoughts collapse for a moment and the mind is free to just experience. Magic is a window to eternity. — Patrick Martin

Lying there, I close my eyes for a time, then open them. I silently breathe in, then out. A thought begins to form in my mind, but in the end I think of nothing. Not that there was much difference between the two, thinking and not thinking. I find I can no longer distinguish between one thing and another, between things that existed and things that did not. I look out the window. Until the sky turns white, clouds float by, birds chirp, and a new day lumbers up, gathering together the sleepy minds of the people who inhabit this planet. — Haruki Murakami

Everything stops in her and sinks into silence. She drives slowly, foggy pictures painted in her mind. She has to open a window, but how will she withstand the rush of air? She can hardly breathe. She is frozen around a fragment embedded inside her. Only her heart is suddenly full of life, the only part of her that beats in excitement and goes out to Shaul, goes out limping, goes out hunchbacked, with Band-Aids stuck all over it, but goes out. — David Grossman

He had been hurt doing everything he had ever done. He expected it, even wanted it. Nothing centered a man like pain. Nothing drove the irrelevant bullshit our of your mind like the taste of your own blood. Duffy always wanted to tell people who were worried about the future of their children, or about God and the order of the universe, to go out and break a rib or two. A few broken ribs threw all thoughts of children, God and the order of the universe right out the window. Nobody with broken ribs ever had free-floating anxiety, or so Duffy was convinced. It was cheaper that a psychiatrist and never so humiliating. — Harry Crews

The smell of grease in the Horseshoe Diner was strong, like the residuals of every meal that had ever been cooked over its open griddle. I lingered in a corner booth near the window, speaking to my wife Ava on the cell phone. With as much free time as a corpse, I pondered past mistakes, but I kept the call short before she asked too many questions and revived the dying thoughts in my mind. A man was a sharp and useful tool, I thought, as long as he never paused to consider it. — Christopher Klim

Remember, the mind likes to window shop. It fancies the life in this boutique, then wants to try on the boots in another. But the soul invests all of itself. It's not as casual or as distracted by fashion, sales, promises or ease of acquisition. It's not interested in possibility. It pitches toward destiny. That's why you will never know a sense of ease, even when you come up with answers, unless you choose to listen to the answer that will take away all questions. — Tama Kieves