Zadie Smith Quotes

I'm happy to feed the squirrels - tree rats with the agility of point guards - but in fair weather, they frighten my finches. They leap from snowbank to porch to feeder and stuff their cheek pouches with chickadee feed.

I didn't move. I've learned from years of experience that dogs and falcons and ladies come back to you if you stay where you are.

This squirrel is inadequately afraid of humans! Squirrel, I am a threat to you! We are enemies! Please get off my bench! Oh, god! Oh, god! Don't touch me—oh, god!

A few times in my life I've had moments of clarity where the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think.

She told them simply and directly that the meadow was a place of peace and beauty, where indeed if one came to it in a quiet manner, the animals would not be disturbed; for there are lovely birds, and squirrels and field mice, and sometimes deer.

And then more quiet, silence so deep it almost drowned out the roar of the night music that pounded away in my secret self.

When you sit, everything sits with you.

Walking is a meditative act. It's so rare that we allow ourselves just to be.

You don't always have to be doing something. The most of something that you can do sometimes is to be in the present doing nothing.

If we spent half an hour every day in silent immobility, I am convinced that we should conduct all our affairs, personal, national, and international, far more sanely than we do at present.

Frankie [Avalon] ... was interested in eating everything so it didn't eat him first.

I used to think anxiety and insomnia drove me to success, but it was the stillness that let me be good at anything. When you extend the seconds of stillness, that's when you're able to think and learn.

One way to practice staying present is to simply sit still for a while and listen. For one minute, listen to the sounds close to you. For one minute, listen to the sounds at a distance. Just listen attentively.

Acceptance is a small quiet room.

beauty is like piety--you cannot run and read it; tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed.

The greatest events-they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.

Fear sits and smiles and is predatory, immobile and silent and serene; an observer who conserves his energy and is content to wait.

How still, How strangely still The water is today, It is not good For water To be so still that way. ~ "Sea Calm

the calm of a place like Bellwood is the peace of death without the hope of resurrection.

The night is still waiting.

There comes in all our lives a time ... when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.

For quiet times disappear listen to the ocean

Just sitting in silence is one of the best things a man can do.

Other sound than the owl's voice there was none, save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.

I am a gardener of infinite time.