Alice Foote MacDougall Quotes

Western man is schizophrenic.

A lot of problems get solved in those sort of in-between moments when your subconscious has been working on some problem. If you keep it spinning, you can fix ideas sometimes better than if you focus on them directly.

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.

I'm sure I have a process, but it mostly takes place in my dreams.

There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.

Each mind has its own method.

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

Your subconscious is always working in the background, unlocking things and solving problems.

It can take a surprisingly long time to get from one part of my mind to another.

There is a method in his madness, and the rudimentary idea in my mind is growing. It will be a whole idea soon, and then, oh, unconscious cerebration.

The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer.

But time has a way of stealthily deciding a person’s mind without her conscious knowledge, and as she studied and procrastinated, Poison found one day that she had come to know her choice.

The heart and the mind, what an enigma.

Can the mind resolve a psychological problem immediately?

A dream is the mind's way of answering a question it hasn't yet figured out how to ask.

We are made up of an entire parliament of pieces and parts and subsystems. Beyond a collection of local expert systems, we are collections of overlapping, ceaselessly reinvented mechanism, a group of competing factions. The conscious mind fabricates stories to explain the sometimes inexplicable dynamics of the subsystem inside brain. It can be disquieting to consider the extent to which all of our actions are driven by hardwired systems doing what they do best while we overlay stories about choices.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me.

The thing I want to know is, if you tell your brain not to do stuff... and it keeps doing it anyway, does that mean your mind has a mind of its own? And if it does, then who's in charge here, anyway?

However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the "Eureka!" comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking.

The freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below the conscious mind.

Our minds do unusual things sometimes, Tamara. When we’re looking for things it takes it upon itself to go down its own route. All we can do is follow

The subconscious is like having a laboratory assistant who pretends to love you and help you, but after you go home to go to sleep it goes back into the lab and starts fumbling with the data and destroying it. It's a very tricky thing. People think our minds are us, but that's not true at all. The mind is not us.

When Arthur Ashe plays tennis, his purpose each day is to play the game in a way he has never played it before. It may be a backhand he uses, one that he may never have used before in that circumstance. His play is a fresh integration of his world at the instant of action. A really great scientist has the whole past at his disposal. At any instant he is rebuilding the world, molecule by molecule, in his subconscious. That is what you want in an athlete or a scientist.

Part of my mind is working on how to end the thing while I'm going on. You need at least two brains to write.