Andrew Sean Greer Quotes

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tar pit big enough to hold it.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.

Every aspect of our lives plays out in two versions: one conscious, which we are constantly aware of, and the other unconscious, which remains hidden from us.

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

Magic symbolises the subconscious - that part of us that is creative and powerful that we sometimes don't tap into.

Our unconscious is like a vast subterranean factory with intricate machinery that is never idle, where work goes on day and night from the time we are born until the moment of our death.

Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions.

Subconscious minds are no less fallible than the objective mind.

At times your unconsciousness is truer than your conscious mind

The subconscious is like having a laboratory assistant who pretends to love you and help you, but after you go home to go to sleep it goes back into the lab and starts fumbling with the data and destroying it. It's a very tricky thing. People think our minds are us, but that's not true at all. The mind is not us.

The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.

Is it not clear that a reviewer's psyche, like an iceberg, is seven-eighths beneath the surface?

The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.

At night my mind does not much care if what it thinks is here or there. It tells me stories, it invents and makes up things that don't make sense. I do not know why it does this stuff. The real world seems quite weird enough.

There is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias.

All my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made.

Knowing that something is wrong and doing it anyway happens very often in life, and I doubt I will ever know why.

Insofar as she recognized at all that she was dreaming, she realized that she must be exploring her subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was really clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.

While a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution – so one theory goes – this faculty soon enough became a seditious agent working against us … we need to hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see … Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are – hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones

Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.

They say dreams are the windows of the soul-take a peek and you can see the inner workings, the nuts and bolts.

grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.

Something happens when your subconscious goes to work... That's why 'Sleep on it' is an adage.