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The Universe of Silence
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it’s not true.
— Steinbeck
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Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had ‘Loneliness’ and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.
— Carl Sandburg
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The lord is not a person with sense organs, but consciousness itself… God is consciousness. There is essentially nothing in the universe but mind, or consciousness.
— Paramahansa Yogananda
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Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then you can detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made.
-Samuel Beckett
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I don’t actually have ‘loneliness,’ but I do value my aloneness. I wouldn’t be able to create anything without it. Writing is not a group activity, nor is painting. If one can learn how to inhabit silence, even briefly, unexpected insights…
