Stilling Quotes

“He places me on the concrete floor, expressionless as he studies me. “It’ll be easier next time,” he whispers, “killing on command.” 1352 hunkers in front of me, his brown eyes boring into mine. “They’ll desensitise you through exposure or drive you mad by it. Either way, sooner or later the death will cease to matter to you. All that remains to be seen is if you’ll retain your sanity when that happens.”“Is that what they did to you?” I snarl at him, my fear of the truth in his admission urging me to anger.“No,” 1352 answers simply, “they didn’t need to because I’ve been theirs from the moment I woke up.” He rests a palm over my chest, “You though, you still have a heart. You’re not a corpse made animate. They need to kill you before they can possess you but death is not always the stilling of a pulse. Sometimes it takes the more complex task of destroying a soul to kill a person, rather than simply sending it on its way. They need to corrupt you because they need you to behave in a way that overshadows everything you’ve ever stood for previously, only then can they claim you.”

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, butfor the heart to conquer it.”

“Rest in your God-breathed worth. Stop holding your breath, hiding your gifts, ducking your head, dulling your roar, distracting your soul, stilling your hands, quieting your voice, and satiating your hunger with the lesser things of this world.”

“Patanjali says that we can meditate on anything that our heart desires. The important thing is not what we meditate on, but more that we meditate. And then gradually to meditate more and more on what corresponds to the innermost longing of our heart. The practice of meditation . . . gradually works its magic in stilling the mind. (42)”

“Poppies in JulyLittle poppies, little hell flames,Do you do no harm?You flicker. I cannot touch you.I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.And it exhausts me to watch youFlickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.A mouth just bloodied.Little bloody skirts!There are fumes that I cannot touch.Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?If I could bleed, or sleep!If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,Dulling and stilling.But colorless. Colorless.”

“Recently I've been having the fantasy more and more" the one where Tack and I run away, disappear under the wide-open sky into the forest with leaves like green hands, welcoming us. In my fantasy, the more we walk, the cleaner we get, like the woods are rubbing away the past few years, all the blood and the fighting and the scars - sloughing off the bad memories and the false starts, leaving us shiny and new, like dolls just taken out of the package.And in this fantasy, my fantasy life, we find a stone cottage hidden deep in the forest, untouched, fitted with beds and rugs and plates and everything we need to live - like the owners just picked up and walked away, or like the house had been built for us and was just waiting all this time.We fish the stream and hunt the woods in the summer. We grow potatoes and peppers and tomatoes big as pumpkins. In the winter we stay inside by the fire while snow falls around us like a blanket, stilling the world, cocooning it in sleep.”

“Oh, listen. Listen!' A sound like a big crowd a good way off, excited and shouting, getting closer. We stand up and scan the empty sky. Suddenly there they are (the geese), a wavering V headed directly over the hilltop, quite low, beating southward down the central flyway and talking as they pass. We stay quiet suspending our human conversation until their garulity fades and their wavering lines are invisible in the sky.They have passed over us like an eraser over a blackboard, wiping away whatever was there before they came.”