Quotessence
Home / Books / About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

Book by Barry Lopez · 4 quotes · Diving, Nature, Ocean

Filter quotes by topic

AllDivingNatureOceanBeautyBeauty In NatureCuriosityIntensityMeditationMemoryMysteryPersonal EssayPracticeReefsScuba DivingSpiritStoryTerrorThought

About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory Quotes

“Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking-through, a theory of rivers, of trees moving, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening of the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying with a staff, the practice of wood.”

SpiritNaturePracticeMeditationThoughtBeauty In Nature
Book:About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory
Create image

“Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror.”

NatureBeautyOceanTerrorIntensityDivingScuba Diving
Book:About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory
Create image

“I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. How were they related? What were the verbs? Which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I asked a dozen knowledgeable people. No one was inclined to elaborate- or they didn’t know. “Did you see the octopus?” Someone shouted after the dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was THERE, just then? WHY?”

MysteryOceanCuriosityDivingReefs
Book:About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory
Create image