Gail Godwin Quotes

Nothing to do with anything, something to do with everything.

Not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine

To the infinite, all finites are equal.

And since the portions of the great and the small are equal in number, so too all things would be in everything. Nor is it possible that they should exist apart, but all things have a portion of everything.

We are not the same. But we are, somehow, one.

Either it is the fold of the infinite, or the constant folds [replis] of finitude which curve the outside and constitute the inside.

The sun and its light, the ocean and the wave, the singer and his song — not one. Not two.

We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.

One link in a chain explains the infinite chain.

Feelings, whether of compassion or irritation, should be welcomed, recognized, and treated on an absolutely equal basis; because both are ourselves. The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I plant with all my heart and mind. I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath. Nothing should be treated more carefully than anything else. In mindfulness, compassion, irritation, mustard green plant, and teapot are all sacred.

Those things that are in the light we behold from darkness.

Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. Petals are bone marrow; pearls come from oysters. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. Its voice thunders and jingles like copper pans. It breathes fire and water; and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many.

the universe and its beings are a complementarity of empty infinity, intimate interrelationships, and total uniqueness of each and every being.

The rose and thorn, the treasure and dragon, joy and sorrow, all mingle into one.

Tao is the source of both fullness and emptiness. But it is itself neither fullness nor emptiness.

An infinite personality is an infinite impossibility.

The infinite being has assumed unto himself the mystery of finitude. And in him who is love the finite and the infinite are made one.

I tried to pay attention, but attention paid me.

You can't have an up without a down. You can't have a left without a right. This is duality. If you have a problem, you must already have the solution. The question is, do you really want the solution, or do you want to perpetuate the problem?

The infinite we shall do right away. The finite may take a little longer.

When I touch that flower, I am not merely touching that flower. I am touching infinity. That little flower existed long before there were human beings on this earth. It will continue to exist for thousands, yes, millions of years to come.

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love - from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter- to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behaviour of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.

Nature has neither core nor skin: she’s both at once outside and in.