Favorite Quotes from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte

on Besieged

“Creating a state of aloneness in the besieged everyday may be one of the bravest things individual men and women can do for themselves.” (p. 36)

on Close

“We are in effect, always close, always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach; the step between not understanding that and understanding that is as close as we get to happiness.” (p. 40-41)

on Denial

“Denial is a beautiful transitional state every human begin inhabits before they are emancipated into the next larger context and orphaned, often against their will, from their old and very familiar home.” (p. 58)

on Despair

“To keep despair alive we have to abstract and immobilise our bodies, our faculties of hearing, touch and smell, and keep the surrounding springtime of the world at a distance.” (p. 64)

on Genius

“Genius might not be a fixed platform where we can arrive solely through accomplishment; it is more likely the ability to live and breath at the place where our particular, individual physical body meets all the other bodies of the world, corporeal and elemental: a body breathed over by wind, shaken by interior tremors, and washed away and rearranged by periodic floods; it has its own hard-won language and its attempts to order the un-orderable, but it also must follow the seasons, its own forms of happiness and its particular and necessary griefs.” (p. 92)

on Heartbreak

“Heartbreak is how we mature. Yet we use the word ‘heartbreak’ as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time.” (p. 116)

on Hiding

“Hiding is creative, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control.” (p. 131)

on Lonely

“Lonely human beings are lonely because they are made to belong. Loneliness is a single malt taste of the very essentiality that makes conscious belonging possible.” (p. 149)

on Love

“In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it, before we can utter the right words or understand what has happened to us, or is continuing to happen to us: an invitation to the most difficult art of all, to love without naming it at all.” (p. 169)

on Pain

“In pain, suddenly find our understanding and compassion engaged as to why others may find it hard to participate.” (p. 177)

on Rest

“In the first state of rest is the sense of stopping, of giving up on what we have been doing or how we have been being. In the second is the sense of slowly coming home, the physical journey into the body’s uncoerced and unbullied self, as it if trying to remember the way or even the destination itself. In the third state is a sense of healing and self-forgiveness and of arrival. In the fourth state, deep in the primal exchange of the breath, is the give and take, the blessing and the being blessed. and the ability to delight in both. The fifth state is a sense of absolute readiness and presence, a delight in and an anticipation of the world and all its forms; a sense of being the meeting itself between inner and outer, and that receiving and responding occur in one spontaneous movement.” (p. 201)

on Self-Knowledge

“The hope that a human being can achieve complete honesty and self-knowledge with regard to themselves is a fiction and a chimera, the jargon and goals of a corporate educational system brought to bear on the depths of an identity where the writ of organizing language does not run.” (p. 224)

on Touch

“To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness; a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstanding of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.” (p. 249)

on Unrequited

“The great discipline seems to be to give up wanting to control the manner in which we are requited, and to forgo the natural disappointment that flows from expecting an exact and measured reciprocation, from a partner, from a child, from our hopes for a loving God.” (p. 259)