Frederick Weisel Quotes

What spares us is memory," he said. "It's what makes us worth saving. However low we sink, whatever promise we no longer fulfill, we tell our stories. That's why you're so important, Charlie. You're a guardian of our national memory. ~ Frederick Weisel

If they're together long enough, every couple has one conversation over and over. This was ours. ~ Frederick Weisel

At first, he talked about the flowers in the garden behind his country house in Surrey. His voice still had its Midlands accent but was soft now and barely audible. He knew the plants by name and took a few minutes with each of them: ageratum, coreopsis, echinacea, rudbeckia. The yarrow, he said, had rose-red flowers on two-foot stems. Achillea millefolium, the plant Achilles used to heal wounds. ~ Frederick Weisel

The sun had already set behind the mountains, and the sky had been drained of color. The trellises of sauvignon blanc flowed down the hill in even rows toward the valley floor. Whatever I was looking for, it wasn't outside. As far as I could tell, the grapes were minding their own business. ~ Frederick Weisel

Nico's hair was combed straight up, stiff with mousse, the tips dyed the color of traffic cones. ~ Frederick Weisel

There's an old adage: the sensation of drowning reminds you of everything you ever knew about swimming. ~ Frederick Weisel

I lived that year on top of a wooden tower in an area east of Santa Rosa known as the Valley of the Moon. ~ Frederick Weisel

As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words. ~ Frederick Weisel

The problem with escaping is that we leave behind us, even among those we love, different versions of the truth and everything we couldn't bring ourselves to say. ~ Frederick Weisel

Aren't autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don't we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am. ~ Frederick Weisel

Anita Kleinman was a slight woman in her seventies. Her hair was thinning and white with a touch of pink, and was swept back from her face in unbroken waves. She wore a full-length Chinese silk gown covered with bright gold dragons on a blue background. Her fingers were tipped with long red nails and heavy with gold rings. She held out her arms in an expression of welcome and perhaps to show me the full extent of her dragons. ~ Frederick Weisel

Sometimes, however much you plan, however many precautions you take, something happens, and in a minute the world is changed. After that, you're the person on the other side of that minute. ~ Frederick Weisel

But, whatever the magic, I wasn't smarter than chemistry, and after a while, I heard two people talking in the empty room next door, their whispers coming out of the phone jack. ~ Frederick Weisel

Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing - escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you'll find a compulsion to flee - a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores.
- Teller: A Novel ~ Frederick Weisel

The place that you gain the most power is within your own mind. Stopping thought generates power. That is why people meditate. The longer you can stop thought, the more power you gain. ~ Frederick Lenz

Meidtation and selfless giving must always go together. They work together to create immortality. ~ Frederick Lenz

I liked the name Frederick Bickel and I wish now I had left it as it was. After all, Theodore Bikel, whose name was similar though spelled differently, didn't change his, and he did all right. ~ Fredric March

Watch out for negative power places on the earth, if you can "see" they are reddish and they twist your feelings. They don't vibrate at a rate conducive to humanity. ~ Frederick Lenz

Thought is the ultimate tonal. Each thought is like a dike that blocks out the nagual. ~ Frederick Lenz

When I leave the body someday, I can help people just as effectively if they focus upon me. ~ Frederick Lenz

Look at the big picture of the wheel of life. Above it, there is a Buddha. He is pointing, not towards the wheel, but away from it. He is indicating that there is something else - nirvana. ~ Frederick Lenz

When I was very, very young - four, five, six - I could see inside people, their motives, their dreams, their apprehension of reality. ~ Frederick Lenz

There is no self. There is nobody home. No forwarding address, no zip code. Address unknown. ~ Frederick Lenz

The smoke from the fire passes through the building and the soot affixes itself to the walls. The smoke passes through the air and keeps going - liberation. ~ Frederick Lenz

What you will be in your next life is the sum total of the realizations that you have had in this lifetime. ~ Frederick Lenz

Any good athletic is always in a state of perpetual training, as is the Zen student. ~ Frederick Lenz

A lot of the parallel processing software we're currently developing for supercomputers is tantric. ~ Frederick Lenz

In life you don't get everything you pay for, but you must pay for everything you get. ~ Frederick Douglass

Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is there. It is he who listens at the door. It is he who is coming. It is our father who is about to be born. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. ~ Frederick Buechner

Want what you have, and then you can have what you want. ~ Frederick Dodson

A true master has developed, in their inner practices and studies, certain powers. These powers are sometimes of the miraculous nature, the transmission of attention. ~ Frederick Lenz

Don't care what anybody says about enlightenment, except the enlightened and those who seek it. ~ Frederick Lenz

The universe is complicated and we're not going to get it all in one night or one incarnation or one infinity. ~ Frederick Lenz

Awakening the mystical kundalini prematurely is dangerous, because unless you have refined your being, you'll get all screwed up, entities, weird powers ... strange things. That is why I don't teach anyone how to open up the chakras. ~ Frederick Lenz

As demand for cotton grew, slavery was considered indispensable as a means of maximizing profit for this labor-intensive staple crop. Equally important, as we shall see, slaves could be financed - that is, purchased on credit. In financial parlance this is called leverage. Planters had one objective: increased cotton production. Arguments about the optimum size of a cotton farm are irrelevant because of slavery's financing characteristic. Simply put, the goal was more cotton, which called for financing the purchase of more land and more slaves. Because a mechanical means of solving cotton's production needs did not exist until the mid-twentieth century, cotton demanded an endless supply of black bodies as long as the price of cotton permitted financing. The Northerner Frederick Law Olmsted, ~ Gene Dattel

Then you try to go to sleep and wake up to face the next day. And the next, until fear is the thing that keeps you sharp instead of the thing that makes you bleed. ~ Jen Frederick

Until you value yourself, you can't expect anyone else to do so. ~ John Frederick Demartini

You must discriminate between those who claim to help you and only want to manipulate you and those who are free, who never manipulate. ~ Frederick Lenz

Change is continuous and the aggregate of the self is constantly shifting. ~ Frederick Lenz

Now and always, we expect to insist upon it that we are Americans, that America is our native land; that this is our home; that we are American citizens . . . and that it is the duty of the American people so to recognize us. - FREDERICK DOUGLASS A ~ Elizabeth Dowling Taylor

It is necessary to be focused. This is the raison d'etre of career. ~ Frederick Lenz

I don't go to church all that regularly, and one reason I don't is very often when I go I am bored out of my wits. I find myself being addressed by preachers who, I assume, were led by some initial passion for Christ, for the truth, for God, for "the More." That's what got them there. But that has gotten buried under all the debris of having to run a church, of concerns. ~ Frederick Buechner

People can insert thoughts into your mind. This is more dangerous for psychic people. Use concentration exercises and read to combat this; boredom is an easy way to be drained. ~ Frederick Lenz

It is a good thing to read books, and need not be a bad thing to write them, but in any case, it is a pious thing to collect them. ~ Frederick Locker-Lampson

The more men you make free, the more freedom is strengthened, and the more men you give an interest in the welfare and safety of the State, the greater is the security of the State. ~ Frederick Douglass

Not everyone is your friend. When you are psychic you tend to forget that others don't view life the way you do. ~ Frederick Lenz

In my travels, I have found two peoples, the Tibetans and the Fijians, who don't seem to have this problem. Their closeness with their environment, their religions, and their relationships with each other and nature make them feel part of everything. ~ Frederick Lenz

Philosophers are all caught up in their philosophies. That's their house of cards. Religious leaders are caught up in their religious movements to the point where they forget about freedom. Everybody's got their drama going. ~ Frederick Lenz