Abram Quotes

I work with people like Spielberg and Abrams all the time. ~ Gabriel Basso

I tell patients that tranquilizers alone never cure anyone. They merely reduce the intensity of the symptoms and make life slightly more endurable. They create a better behaved, chronic dependent person. Only with orthomolecular treatment can the majority of schizophrenic patients hope to become well and normally independent. ~ Abram Hoffer

There are so many unsung heroines and heroes at this broken moment in our collective story, so many courageous persons who, unbeknownst to themselves, are holding together the world by their resolute love or contagious joy. Although I do not know your names, I can feel you out there. ~ David Abram

We have inherited new difficulties because we have inherited more privileges. ~ Abram L. Sachar

Breathing involves a continual oscillation between exhaling and inhaling, offering ourselves to the world at one moment and drawing the world into ourselves at the next ... ~ David Abram

The death takes a moment and life lasts forever. Why spend eternity worried about a singularity? ~ Abram Gitspof

He [Abram] believes that the PRESENT is the only real thing and everything else is an illusion
a distraction ~ Jennifer DeLucy

Pharmaceutical companies are very annoyed with niacin because their products have to compete with it. Some of their cholesterol-lowering drugs cost up to $150 a month while niacin costs about $10. ~ Abram Hoffer

Do you think that Asian girl over there is pretty? I ask Abram, testing him, wondering if I'm really his type, or if I'm just his type until that rare breed of slutty Asian drops into his lap.
Only when she lets me cheat off of her, he answers. ~ Jay Clark

A land without ruins is a land without memories - a land without memories is a land without history. ~ Abram Joseph Ryan

The animate earth - this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love - is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity ~ David Abram

It is the responsibility of good people to rise against bad rulers. ~ Abram Gitspof

One of these days, she'll let me perform a favor for her without calculating what she owes me, which is always going to be nothing. Except for maybe a kiss, if our relationship ever reaches that level - pinnacle? - where favors can be repaid sexually (in a respectful manner). ~ Jay Clark

Oh, Abram. Please don't waste energy on this. Haters gonna hate, idiots gonna procreate. ~ Penny Reid

The day I fall in love with you for real will be the same day they open up a ski resort in Hell."

"Splendid. That can be our first date." He flashed me a grin which, even in the dark, managed to sparkle. ~ Amanda Abram

I'm afraid the workings of J.J. Abrams' mind falls outside the predictive capacity of any coherent theory. ~ Antony Garrett Lisi

Now m the LORD said [1] to Abram, "Go from your country [2] and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 n And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 o I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and p in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." [3] ~ Anonymous

For schizophrenia, the recovery rate with drug therapy is under 15%. With nutritional therapy, the recovery rate is 80%. ~ Abram Hoffer

Freedom of choice comes at the price of intermittent insanity. ~ Abram Gitspof

is the mountain that lends its gregarious power to the multiple elements of this place. ~ David Abram

If you find that you're going through hell, keep moving. You will get to the end eventually. ~ Kimberly Brouillette

It must be time for my pill. I pull a tiny fourth from my jeans pocket.
Didn't you just take one?
Here. To help you get through class.
He swallows it without a word, tells me he wants to know what it feels like to take what I'm taking. It's the nicest, most disturbing thing anyone has ever said to me. ~ Jay Clark

It couldn't be true. She'd finally put her guard down, tried to trust in someone other than her mother and Abram. She'd finally found someone to love. It couldn't be. God couldn't be so cruel. ~ Taryn Browning

One," said the recording secretary.

"Jesus wept," answered Leon promptly.

There was not a sound in the church. You could almost hear the butterflies pass. Father looked down and laid his lower lip in folds with his fingers, like he did sometimes when it wouldn't behave to suit him.

"Two," said the secretary after just a breath of pause.

Leon looked over the congregation easily and then fastened his eyes on Abram Saunders, the father of Absalom, and said reprovingly: "Give not sleep to thine eyes nor slumber to thine eyelids."

Abram straightened up suddenly and blinked in astonishment, while father held fast to his lip.

"Three," called the secretary hurriedly.

Leon shifted his gaze to Betsy Alton, who hadn't spoken to her next door neighbour in five years.

"Hatred stirreth up strife," he told her softly, "but love covereth all sins."

Things were so quiet it seemed as if the air would snap.

"Four."

The mild blue eyes travelled back to the men's side and settled on Isaac Thomas, a man too lazy to plow and sow land his father had left him. They were not so mild, and the voice was touched with command: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise."

Still that silence.

"Five," said the secretary hurriedly, as if he wished it were over. Back came the eyes to the women's side and past all question looked straight at Hannah Dove ~ Gene Stratton-Porter

The simple truth is ordinary, open and shared by all. ~ Cheryl Abram

The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling. ~ David Abram

Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams - all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue. ~ David Abram

Don't go throwing stones in your glass house, because you're bound to get cut. ~ Amanda Abram

We like to assume that language is a purely human property, our exclusive possession, and that everything else is basically mute. ~ David Abram

Magic doesn't sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine -- to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it. ~ David Abram

To describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we spontaneously experience them, prior to all our conceptualizations and definitions. ~ David Abram

And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto ~ Anonymous

Those who reinforce the disintegrating elements in our society will get no thanks from future generations. The family becomes the ultimate victim of homosexuality, a result which any society can tolerate only within certain limits.

If the American Psychiatric Association endorses one of the symptoms of social distress as a normal phenomenon it demonstrates to the public its ignorance of social dynamics, of the relation of personal maladaptation to social disharmony, and thereby acquires a responsibility for aggravating the already existing chaos.
[response to December 15, 1973 verdict] ~ Abram Kardiner

We are too frightened of shadows. We cannot abide our vulnerability, our utter dependence upon a world that can eat us. Vast in its analytic and inventive power, modern humanity is crippled by a fear of its own animality, and of the animate earth that sustains us. ~ David Abram

it's natural that we associate language with such verbal intercourse. Unfortunately, this association has led many to assume that language is an exclusive attribute of our species - we, after all, are the only creatures that use words - and to conclude that all other organisms are entirely bereft of meaningful speech. It is an exceedingly self-serving assumption. Other animals, commonly possessed of senses far more acute than ours, may have much less need for a purely conventional set of signs to communicate with others of their species, or even to glean precise information from members of other species. ~ David Abram

We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things - of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil - seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what's worth knowing. ~ David Abram

We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. ~ David Abram

Like an airplane, an oven, or an elevator, Faebook is a tool that can make life's To-Dos fun and easy. ~ Carolyn Abram

We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth- our larger body- to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles. We give ourselves over to the influence of the breathing earth. Sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it- cells, tissues, and organs taking their prime directives now from gravity and the wind- as residual bits of sunlight, caught in the long tangle of nerves, wander the drifting landscape of our earth-borne bodies like deer moving across the forested valleys. ~ David Abram

Dull people don't write interesting books. But they sure as hell can write them thick and fast. ~ Abram Gitspof

For magicians -- whether modern entertainers or indigenous, tribal sorcerers -- have in common the fact that they work with the malleable texture of perception. ~ David Abram

If we speak of things as inert or inanimate objects, we deny their ability to actively engage and interact with us - we foreclose their capacity to reciprocate our attentions, to draw us into silent dialogue, to inform and instruct us. ~ David Abram

O father Abram, what these Christians are, Whose own hard dealing teaches them suspect The thoughts of others! ~ William Shakespeare

What we say has such a profound influence upon what we see, and hear, and taste of the world! ~ David Abram

Abram, having failed in Genesis 13, comes through with flying colors in this battle of faith because he aligns himself with God, and he refuses to allow his heart to be compromised by the possibility of taking the riches that this world can offer. ~ Ligon Duncan

Abram was very rich and yet very religious. ~ Matthew Henry

In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the palpable site, or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates. In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed, the two matrices are not separable. We can no more stabilize the language and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all motion and metamorphosis within the land. ~ David Abram

I only subpoena folks for jury duty that I know will be fair... ~ Paul Henry Abram

There are innumerable paths one may choose in this life- some that, at first, appear flawed. Yet, if lived with love and honesty, they will always render the greatest fruit. They will serve as a lesson to us all. - Abram ~ Jennifer DeLucy

A fool holding his own in a debate is sure sign that the topic drifted into metaphysical waters. ~ Abram Gitspof

If the patient has been to more than four physicians, nutrition is probably the medical answer. ~ Abram Hoffer

Being with you . . ." he began, drawing my eyes back to his face. His were dazed, unfocused, like he was looking within and without. "Being with me?" I prompted after almost a minute, curious, a bubble of something reluctantly hopeful expanding in my chest. So of course, a joke slipped out. "Is as the prophesy foretold?" Abram's gaze sharpened on mine. He smiled, a real smile. His left dimple making its first appearance, stealing my breath before his words could. "It's living artistry, Mona." Abram's gaze turned cherishing, earnest. "Being with you is like living in a song. ~ Penny Reid

Abram - Ibrahim, in the Arabic spelling - was the first to worship Allah, the one God, rather than the stars, the moon, or the sun. ~ Susan Wise Bauer

Fobbit is fast, razor sharp, and seven kinds of hilarious. Thank you, Mr. Abrams, for the much needed salve
it feels good to finally laugh about Iraq. Fobbit deserves a place alongside Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 as one of our great comic novels about the absurdity of war. ~ Jonathan Evison

What is magic? In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It's the experience of finding oneself alive within a world that is itself alive. It is the experience of contact and communication between oneself and something that is profoundly different from oneself: a swallow, a frog, a spider weaving its web ... ~ David Abram

I really want to meet and work with JJ Abrams. Everyone talks about what a nice director he is, and he has kids and stuff, so he sounds really awesome, not to mention he makes awesome movies. ~ Ty Simpkins

The world is not your enemy; you are. ~ Cheryl Abram

A mathematician's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given. ~ Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch

All things have the capacity for speech -- all beings have the ability to communicate something of themselves to other beings. Indeed, what is perception if not the experience of this gregarious, communicative power of things, wherein even obstensibly 'inert' objects radiate out of themselves, conveying their shapes, hues, and rhythms to other beings and to us, influencing and informing our breathing bodies though we stand far apart from those things?

Not just animals and plants, then, but tumbling waterfalls and dry riverbeds, gusts of wind, compost piles and cumulus clouds, freshly painted houses (as well as houses abandoned and sometimes haunted), rusting automobiles, feathers, granite cliffs and grains of sand, tax forms, dormant volcanoes, bays and bayous made wretched by pollutants, snowdrifts, shed antlers, diamonds, and daikon radishes, all are expressive, sometimes eloquent and hence participant in the mystery of language. Our own chatter erupts in response to the abundant articulations of the world: human speech is simply our part of a much broader conversation.

It follows that the myriad things are also listening, or attending, to various signs and gestures around them. Indeed, when we are at ease in our animal flesh, we will sometimes feel we are being listened to, or sensed, by the earthly surroundings. And so we take deeper care with our speaking, mindful that our sounds may carry more than a merely human meaning and resonance. This care -- ~ David Abram

He sure does fall asleep a lot. Must be the Paxil. he takes his pill and a half hour later it's like he's roofied himself. ~ Jay Clark

We cannot experience any entity in its totality, because we are not pure, disembodied minds, but are palpable bodies with our own opacities and limits. ~ David Abram

Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world. ~ David Abram

I pretended not to be surprised when she showed up at my sliding door last night. Between the dog and me? I thought she was either a super-dedicated UPS guy or a polite serial killer. ~ Jay Clark

A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And 'making sense' must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one's felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are. ~ David Abram

It takes approximately forty years for innovative thought to be incorporated into mainstream thought. I expect and hope that orthomolecular medicine, within the next five to ten years, will cease to be a specialty in medicine and that all physicians will be using nurition as an essential tool in treating disease. ~ Abram Hoffer

Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are "true" or "false," but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth. The ways of speaking common to that community - the claims and beliefs that enable such reciprocity to perpetuate itself - are, in this important sense, true. They are in accord with a right relation between these people and their world. Statements and beliefs, meanwhile, that foster violence toward the land, ways of speaking that enable the impairment or ruination of the surrounding field of beings, can be described as false ways of speaking - ways that encourage an unsustainable relation with the encompassing earth. A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regardless of how many supported facts it has amassed regarding the calculable properties of its world. ~ David Abram

How monotonous our speaking becomes when we speak only to ourselves! And how insulting to the other beings – to foraging black bears and twisted old cypresses – that no longer sense us talking to them, but only about them, as though they were not present in our world…Small wonder that rivers and forests no longer compel our focus or our fierce devotion. For we walk about such entities only behind their backs, as though they were not participant in our lives. Yet if we no longer call out to the moon slipping between the clouds, or whisper to the spider setting the silken struts of her web, well, then the numerous powers of this world will no longer address us – and if they still try, we will not likely hear them. ~ David Abram

Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils-all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. ~ David Abram

Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air. ~ David Abram

Sensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem. ~ David Abram

Fiercely intelligent, yet bearing a sensibility far more porous than most, Van Gogh was unable, or unwilling, to abstract his intellect from his body's reality, unwilling to abandon the myriad things, to tame his senses and so stifle the steady eros between his flesh and the flesh of the earth.

"Again and again he slides out of himself, through his eyes, to feel the hunkard silence of the olive groves, and to taste the spreading ecstasy of the leaves as they're slowly lit by the climbing sun. And again and again he is invaded, in turn, by the visible -- penetrated by the midday langor of the rolling wheat fields, or by the sullen mood of a neighbor's face. Although he writes often to his brother and a few friends (letters of luminous candor and kindness), it is only in the act of drawing and painting that he is able to give expression to this ongoing intercourse, by offering back to the visible a trace of what the visible steadily pours into his chest.

"His paintings, then, are windows through which we look onto an earth no less alive and intelligent than ourselves ~ David Abram

Abram, the first Jew was actually an Iraqi. ~ Matt Chandler

Modern medicine is not scientific, it is full of prejudice, illogic and susceptible to advertising. Doctors are not taught to reason, they are programmed to believe in whatever their medical schools teach them and the leading doctors tell them. Over the past 20 years the drug companies, with their enormous wealth, have taken medicine over and now control its research, what is taught and the information released to the public. ~ Abram Hoffer

The politics of that year [2004] are old now, but the problem remains the same, the real culture clash of American life. It's between the essence of fundamentalism - paternalism, authority, and charity - and the messy imperatives of democracy, "the din of the vox populi" once derided by Abram Vereide. It's the difference between false unity, preached from above, and real solidarity, pledged between brothers and sisters - the kinds who are always bickering. ~ Jeff Sharlet

For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse. ~ David Abram

God wanted Abram to be his friend, and friends trust each other, and you can't learn to trust someone without a little risk and uncertainty and vulnerability. ~ John Ortberg

And he blessed him and said: "Blessed [favored with blessings, made blissful, joyful] be Abram of God Most High, Possessor [and Maker] of heaven and earth" (Genesis 14:19). ~ John Crowder

Truth is irrefutable and untainted by bias. Sunrise, Abram, death: these are truths. ~ Nora Sakavic

We use generators," Abram explained. "For the basics, but we don't believe in progress for the sake of progress, nor do we hold with the idea of acquiring for the sake of showing ourselves better than our neighbors, which is often a byproduct of your modern conveniences. All of these things distance one from nature and a true relationship with our God. ~ Ruth Price

One's relation to one's house, in other words, is hardly a relation between a pure subject and a pure object - between an active intelligence, or mind, and a purely passive chunk of matter. ~ David Abram

She told her father Mr. Abram Colhard that she did not like it at all being one being living then. He never said anything. She was afraid then, she was one needing charming stories and happy telling of them and not having that thing she was always trembling. ~ Gertrude Stein

I like this documentary, starring her in captivity, better. ~ Jay Clark

I hold out my fist and knock on the glass. I watch Abram's brain process the sound, probably doesn't hear it very often unless he's got a late-night side-skank I'm unaware of, and he better not. ~ Jay Clark

18 So that day Jehovah made this covenant with Abram: "I have given this land to your descendants from the Wadi-el-Arish[*] to the Euphrates River. 19-21 And I give to them these nations: Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Jebusites. ~ Anonymous

The secret of the true love of work is the hope of success in that work; not for the money reward, for the time spent, or for the skill exercised, but for the successful result in the accomplishment of the work itself. ~ Sidney Abram Weltmer

Human language, for us moderns, has swung in on itself, turning its back on the beings around us. Language is a human property, suitable only for communication with other persons. We talk to people; we do not speak to the ground underfoot. We've largely forgotten the incantatory and invocational use of speech as a way of bringing ourselves into deeper rapport with the beings around us, or of calling the living land into resonance with us. It is a power we still brush up against whenever we use our words to bless and to curse, or to charm someone we're drawn to. But we wield such eloquence only to sway other people, and so we miss the greater magnetism, the gravitational power that lies within such speech. The beaver gliding across the pond, the fungus gripping a thick trunk, a boulder shattered by its tumble down a cliff or the rain splashing upon those granite fragments -- we talk about such beings, the weather and the weathered stones, but we do not talk to them.

Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, we've overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral [storytelling] ancestors. We've lost our ear for the music of language -- for the rhythmic, melodic layer of speech by which earthly things overhear us. ~ David Abram

Half-way there, a touch of his normal common sense returned to him and he slowed down, wondering what exchange of courtesies he was going to offer a vagabond, an Abram man, or an idiot. Then the man turned his head and Richard saw that he was none of these things. That the frieze cloak he wore was rich, and fell back from the silk of a high-collared tunic; that his hair, flicked by the wind, was yellow as mustard and the shadowless face, faintly engraved upon and tired as cered linen, was indeed that of Francis his brother.

Lymond did not move. His head lifted, watching, showed no conventional welcome; his brows, cloudily drawn, suggested the weight of something so firmly extinguished that nothing was left, in thought or expression, save a curious air, part of resignation, part of defiance which had to do, perhaps, with his stillness. Only the edge of his cloak stirred tardily, with his inaudible breathing. His parted lips closing, Richard Crawford came to a halt and stood, looking down at his brother.

'There is not a soul but over it is a keeper,' Lymond said. 'Welcome, brother.' ~ Dorothy Dunnett

When God promised Abram that he would make his name great, he was already known as Abram (exalted father) by many who were close to him. It follows then that the name Abram was not the "great" name God had promised to bestow upon him. But something very supernatural happened to the spiritual matrix of his name when he met Melchizedek in the Valley of Shaveh. ~ Francis Myles

We may acknowledge, intellectually, our body's reliance upon those plants and animals that we consume as nourishment, yet the civilized mind still feels itself somehow separate, autonomous, independent of the body and of bodily nature in general. Only as we begin to notice and to experience, once again, our immersion in the invisible air do we start to recall what it is to be fully a part of this world… This breathing landscape is no longer just a passive backdrop against which human history unfolds, but a potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate. ~ David Abram

The properties of mind are not purely mental: They are shaped in crucial ways by the body and brain and how the body can function in everyday life. The embodied mind is thus very much of this world. Our flesh is inseparable from what Merleau-Ponty called the "flesh of the world" and what David Abram refers to as "the-more-than-human-world." Our body is intimately tied to what we walk on, sit on, touch, taste, smell, see, breathe, and move within. Our corporeality is part of the corporeality of the world. ~ George Lakoff

But if Abram bore his continual wanderings patiently, our fastidiousness is utterly inexcusable, when we murmur against God, if he does not grant us a quiet nest. ~ John Calvin

I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man should think i behaved in a paltry manner (Charles Darwin) ~ Abram Kardiner

No matter the deviation, all things come full circle. You begin and end your journey in the same place, but with a different set of eyes. - Abram ~ Jennifer DeLucy

Before you shoot the messenger, it helps to get the message first. ~ Abram Gitspof

The goal of a great democracy should be fulfillment, not ease. It should be adequacy, not serenity. ~ Abram L. Sachar

I tried to close my ears to the strange worshipful chanting and fix my mind on God, but the Egyptians' idolatry weighed down my weary shoulders and brought tears to my closed eyes. ~ Kristen Reed