Heather O'Neill Quotes

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

Colour is the touch of the eye, Music to the deaf, A word out of darkness.

Eating, bathing, going to the toilet, talking, thinking, and many other activities related to the body are all work. How is it that the performance of one particular act is alone (considered) work? To be still is to be always engaged in work. To be silent is to be always talking.

Mind cannot think without duality. Duality is the way of thinking. In silence, all dualities disappear.

Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think....In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think.

Can you look at a flower without thinking?

(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.

I think we're all guilty of mistaking the actors we've seen over and over again - we think we know them.

But ordinarily you think otherwise: you think if you are silent you will be sad. Ordinarily you think, how can you avoid sadness if you are silent? I tell you, the silence that exists with sadness cannot be true. Something has gone wrong. You have missed the path, you are off the track. Only celebration can give proof that the real silence has happened.

The trouble with being quoted a lot is that it makes other people think you're quoting yourself when in fact you're merely repeating yourself.

I love silence. And one of the paradoxes about the way I live and also about my work is that definitely one of the reasons I went into music, and especially into composing is that I love setting up an environment where I can be by myself for long periods of time and have everything as quiet as possible, either to think about sound, or to think about ideas, or just to focus on things that are important to me.

Meditation is how to drop knowledge. Meditation means how to become ignorant again. Meditation means how to become a child again, a rose bush, a rock. Meditation means how just to be and not to think.

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

As in music, when we hear the crescendo building, suddenly if the music stops, we begin to hear the silence as part of the music.

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

The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white.

The silence between the notes is the good part for me. I find that to be a very important part of music that is often lacking.

Composer” is a word which here means “a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play.” This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing. This is called decomposing.

There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.

I listen to music a lot, if I need to get into a particular space. I do stretching and breathing, and take time to mostly be quiet and find the stillness. I think that's important.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.

As we're standing there I realize we're almost exactly the same height. We must look like the dark and light side of an Oreo cookie, and I think how just as easily it could have been the other way around. She could be blocking my path; I could be trying to slip around her into the dark.

She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

It's quiet now. So quiet that can almost hear other people's dreams.

Now the mountains were getting that pink tinge, I mean the rocks, they were just solid rock covered with the atoms of dust accumulated there since beginningless time. In fact I was afraid of those jagged monstrosities all around and over our heads. "They're so silent!" I said. "Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sitting there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin.