Cessation Quotes

“Song


You know that it is there, lair
where the bear ceases
for a time even to exist.

Crawl in. You have at last killed
enough and eaten enough to be fat
enough to cease for a time to exist.

Crawl in. It takes talent to live at night, and scorning
others you had that talent, but now you sniff
the season when you must cease to exist.

Crawl in. Whatever for good or ill
grows within you needs
you for a time to cease to exist.

It is not raining inside
tonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“My happiest moments are those when I think nothing, want nothing, and dream nothing, being lost in a torpor like some accidental plant, like mere moss growing on life's surface. I savour without bitterness this absurd awareness of being nothing, this foretaste of death and extinction.”
― Pessoa Fernando

“It ceased at last, as everything dreadful has to cease, even if it ceases only by death.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Odd that „now and here” is „nowhere”.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“To posses in the shade, that nobility of spirit that makes no demands on life. To be in the whirl of the worlds like dust of flowers, sailing through the afternoon air on unknown wind and falling, in the torpor of dusk, wherever it falls, lost among larger things. To be this with a sure understanding, neither happy nor sad, grateful to the sun for its brilliance and to the stars for their remoteness. To be no more, have no more, want no more … The music of the hungry beggar, the song of blind man, the relic of the unknown wayfarer, the tracks in the desert of the camel without burden or destination …”
― Pessoa, Fernando

“Peace at least. All that was dross and residue vanishes from my soul as if it had never been. I'm alone and calm. It's like the moment when I could theoretically convert to a religion. But although I'm no longer attracted to anything down here, I'm also not attracted to anything up above. I feel free, as if I'd ceased to exist and were conscious of that fact.”
― Pessoa Fernando

“Now the twin leaves of the seedling chestnut oak on the Carvin's cover path have dried, dropped, and blown; the acorn itself is shrunk and sere. But the sheath of the stem holds water and the white root still delicately sucks, porous and permeable, mute. The death of the self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll. It is merely the slow cessation of the will's sprints and the intellect's chatter: it is waiting like a hollow bell with stilled tongue. Fuge, tace, quiesce. The waiting itself is the thing.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Dead-ends are never the ‘end of the road.’ They are only the end of ‘this’ road.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“[E]very cognition arises from, and subsides into, the timeless transpersonal ground of pure awareness.... [A]t the terminus of any stream of cognition, cognition dissolves into stillness.... [A]t that moment, the ground of being, which is unconditioned and expanded awareness, is revealed.”
― Christopher D. Wallis, The Recognition Sutras: Illuminating a 1,000-Year-Old Spiritual Masterpiece