Grasping Quotes

“Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, the total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, too easily.”

“Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, the total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, too easily.”

“You let go of my hand to hold on to my heartDistance grasps us tightnow that we are apart”

“The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning”

“One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.”

“The grasping mind holds on to everything – beliefs, people, possessions – so that it seems as though there is hardly any room to breathe.”

“In reality nobody can grasp anything permanently in life. Absolutely nothing. Somethings may stay in memory for a while but eventually that too fades away.”

“Only a mind free of impediment is capable of grasping the chaotic beauty of the world. This is our greatest asset.”

“The Mad Affliction's arm shot out of the cage, grasping for me. I jumped back. His long, ragged talons swiped the air in front of me."Free me!" the Mad Affliction cried. He grasped for Bethany, but she backed away, too. "Free me and know the living nightmare that is unending madness!""You're not doing yourself any favors," I told him.”

“However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is completed is not, Whitman argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a superficial level, grasping certain meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven't yet grasped. That is why - as Whitman believed, rewriting and re-editing his poems over and over again - no reading can ever be definitive.”

“One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.”