Geoff Dyer Quotes

My brain doesn't like to be quiet.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

My mind is never stopping. I think, if you stop, you die. Maybe it is a problem for me - I have to talk to myself and say, 'Please stop. Switch off.'

I have a mind that never stops working. As a matter of fact, it torments me.

The mind can be but full. It will be as much filled with a small disagreeable occurrence, having no other, as with a large one.

You're always carrying something that's interfering. It's like static noise that doesn't have to be there, and you have to school yourself to clean that out.

When you quiet your mind, you can enter a world of clarity, peace and understanding.

One of those quiet types who logs a lot of time in the bedlam of her head, I sometimes need to be startled awake to the fact that the outside world still exists.

I'm trying to think of myself at a quiet time. I need to do better with a quiet mind because I'm constantly going and I think that's what feeds me. I've been that way my whole life. But I don't think I picture things so much as I talk them through. Words, words, words. Words and melody.

You know, in the case of most of us, the mind is noisy, everlastingly chattering to itself, soliloquizing or chattering about something, or trying to talk to itself, to convince itself of something; it is always moving, noisy.

If you are in a state of intense presence you are free of thought, yet highly alert. If your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in, the mental noise returns, stillness is lost, you're back in time.

It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I.

Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.

There is a way to master silence Control its curves, inhabit its dark corners And listen to the hiss of time outside

A primary method for gaining a mind of full peace is to practice emptying the mind.

That's what I call meditation. You simply stand aloof and just see the mind disappearing, like a cloud on a faraway horizon, leaving the sky clean and pure. And in that state arises your consciousness in its full glory, in its full celebration.

There is nothing mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind's immobility and thought-free stillness. When mind is still, then truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence.

The only reason your mind won't stop its endless chattering is because you won't stop listening to it!

The sound of birds stops the noise in my mind.

The voice in your head is like a wild horse taking you wherever it wants to go...When the voice in your head finally stops talking, you experience inner peace.

Can the mind become completely still without coercion, without compulsion, without discipline?

If he cannot stop the mind that seeks after fame and profit, he will spend his life without finding peace.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their smucking business.

I'm a big thinker, and sometimes I think too much, and my brain can get in the way of myself.