Alice B. Toklas Quotes

It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.

For me, writing is a way of thinking. I write in a journal a lot. I'm a very impatient person, so writing and meditation allow me to slow down and watch my mind; they are containers that keep me in place, hold me still.

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

At times I think and at times I am.

My work has always dealt with a kind of space that allows one to daydream.

Your mind is a free port. There are no customs house officers to examine the cargoes that are unladen.

To know, to think, to dream. That is everything.

To me it is enough to wonder at the secrets

Every mind deserves to be free. When the mind is free, that's the end of suffering.

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge.

The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.

You have to climb to reach a deep thought.

the contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation

What do you look at while you’re making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do no raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor of an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense.

To be well in your mind you have first to be free.

The object of reflection is invariably the discovery of something satisfying to the mind which was not there at the beginning of the search.

You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of complicated state of mind. The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.

As a writer, I can live somewhat independently, occupying nooks and crannies and finding meaning there. I can even live in my mind a good portion of most days.

The apparent craziness of the world, like everything else, is a gift that we can use to set our minds free.

I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.

You spend your time thinking about that and you get lost in reflection.

Go on saying, I am free. Never mind if the next moment delusion comes and says, I am bound. Dehypnotize the whole thing.

One of the things that made me long to be back in prison was that I had so little opportunity for reading, thinking and quiet reflection after my release. I intend, amongst other things, to give myself much more opportunity for such reading and reflection.