"'There are quiet places also in the mind', he said meditatively. 'But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately — to put a stop to the quietness. ... All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head — round and round, continually What's it for? What's it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn't there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night — not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep — the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits ... we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows — a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying ... For one's alone in the crystal, and there's no support from the outside, there is nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or stand on ... There is nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiast about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize you and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die ... one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard of manner."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Antic Hay (1923)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarit…"
"À qui il a été beaucoup donné, il sera beaucoup demandé."
"Imperialism is challenged from two sides. On the one hand, there is a rising tide of nationalism within the various e…"
"The religions whose theology is least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been con…"
"Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to lif…"
"To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs."
"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."
"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong."
"ONE of the evil results of the political subjection of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nat…"
"What the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic."