When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.
He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.
When my eyes meet his gaze as we're sitting here staring at each other, time stops. Those eyes are piercing mine, and I can swear at this moment he senses the real me. The one without the attitude, without the facade[. . . ]
placid, adj. Sometimes I love it when we just lie on our backs, gaze off, stay still.
His gaze slammed into hers. 'I love you. Never forget that. Never forget. . . me. ' He loved her. Emotion bubbled up in her throat, leaving her voice completely wrecked. 'Never,' she rasped.
To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.
She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust. . . his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at. . . She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.
She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
His gaze burned into mine, like he could see past my eyes into parts of me no one had ever seen, and I knew I was seeing the same in him. No one else had ever seen him so vulnerable before, like if I pushed him away, he might crumble into pieces that could never be put together again. Yet there was strength, too. He was strong beneath that fragile need, and I knew that I could never fall with him next to me. If I tripped, he would catch me. If I lost my balance, he would find it.
Today, as chief Of the guardians of the seas Of the land of the dawn, I gaze up with awe At the rising sun!
His gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet - or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered.
There are truths that shield themselves behind veils, and are best spoken by implication. Even the sun veils himself in his own rays to blind the gaze of the too curious starer.
John Cusack is standing over there. ” I followed his incredulous gaze to where a man very like Mr. Cusack did indeed stand, smoking a cigarette as he leaned against a building. I sighed. “That’s not John Cusack. That’s Jerome. ” “Seriously?” “Yup. I told you he looked like John Cusack. ” “Keyword: looked. That guy doesn’t look like him. That guy is him.
We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments. . . . Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own.
We fit, you and I,” he whispered looking into that haunting gaze. “Two broken pieces making a whole.
Lower your gaze from the world and turn your heart away from it. . .
I started out writing romance novels, and that's a side of publishing that's very female oriented. 99. 9% of the writers are women, most of the editors are women, and these are books written for the female gaze. And so my point of view - the way I looked at fandom and publishing and writing - was all about women. So for me that's what was natural, that's what was comfortable. And then I moved over to comics. And all of a sudden it was. . . Pardon the expression, it was a sausage fest.
I was in a band in the '90s called Bikini Kill, and we were so freaked out about documentation then, and there was the whole thing, not just about the male gaze, but that people were going to misrepresent you. . . a kind fear of the mainstream that a lot of us had.
The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
If faith is the gaze of the heart at God, and if this gaze is but the raising of the inward eyes to meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then it follows that it is one of the easiest things possible to do.