Glen Duncan Quotes

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Snow is the beginning and the end of everything.

The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.

Cold and silence. Nothing quieter than snow. The sky screams to deliver it, a hundred banshees flying on the edge of the blizzard. But once the snow covers the ground, it hushes as still as my heart.

I hope the snow covers everything so all the footsteps are silenced, and the whole city can be at peace.

From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness.

Every spring I hear the thrush singing in the glowing woods he is only passing through. His voice is deep, then he lifts it until it seems to fall from the sky. I am thrilled. I am grateful. Then, by the end of morning, he's gone, nothing but silence out of the tree where he rested for a night. And this I find acceptable. Not enough is a poor life. But too much is, well, too much. Imagine Verdi or Mahler every day, all day. It would exhaust anyone.

It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

In other words, all of my books are lies. They are simply maps of a territory, shadows of a reality, gray symbols dragging their bellies across the dead page, suffocated signs full of muffled sound and faded glory, signifying absolutely nothing. And it is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life.

There's no lack of void.

How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers The buck in the snow . . . Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

The true wisdom of the philosopher ought to insist in enjoying everything. Yet we apply ourselves to dissecting and destroying everything that is good in itself, that has virtue, albeit the virtue there is in mere illusions. Nature gives us this life like a toy to a weak child. We want to see how it all works; we break everything. There remains in our hands, and before our eyes, stupid and opened too late, the sterile wreckage, fragments that will not again make a whole. The good is so simple.

Be an empty page, untouched by words.

The sensation reminds him of the first snow of winter, for those first few hours when everything is blanketed in white, soft and quiet.

If hers are the stars in the nighttime sky, mine are the haunted empty spaces in between.

These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.

The after-silence, when the feast is o'er,And void the places where the minstrels stood,Differs in nought from what hath been before,And is nor ill nor good.

So, to meditate is to purge the mind of its self-centered activity. And if you have come this far in meditation, you will find there is silence, a total emptiness. The mind is uncontaminated by society; it is no longer subject to any influence, to the pressure of any desire. It is completely alone, and being alone, untouched it is innocent. Therefore there is a possibility for that which is timeless, eternal, to come into being. This whole process is meditation.

No cloud above, no earth below, A universe of sky and snow.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

A silent dark...as black as a moonless lake, as a ravine's wings, darkness there and nothing more, merely this and nothing more.

The Way is ever nameless.