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Exlpore more Stillness quotes

"Your greatest strength is in your ability to remain still."

"The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together."

"Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Have the patience to wait! Be still and allow the mud to settle."

"The more a person knows the less they talk. I shall cease speaking and endeavor to instill a large band of silence inside myself in order to forge a deeper and closer relationship with all of nature. Only when I attain absolute quietude shall I understand the supreme virtue of humanity and understand the meaning of both life and death. Only when I achieve absolute stillness shall I come to a perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things."

"It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years."

"Meditation becomes easier if you drop all your ambitions and desires."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt


"Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties."


"So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter."


"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."


"Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time."


"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."


"I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much."


"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."
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