Slowness Quotes

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.

Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally received and practiced on.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars?”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole.”
― Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?

“...they never see what they're too much of a hurry to look for”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“And as to being quick, why, bless you! That is only a matter of habit; if you get into the habit of being quick, it is just as easy as being slow; easier, I should say; in fact, it don't agree with my health to be hulking about over a job twice as long as it need take. Bless you! I couldn't whistle if I crawled over my work as some folks do!”
― Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

“What can we do to maintain slowness in the face of those periods of busyness? How can we avoid overload, exhaustion, or even burnout?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, my answer is simply to pay attention.
I recognize the way I'm inclined to stay up late, the way I will procrastinate at every option- and instead of spiraling into that overwhelming sense of too much, I check in with myself.
Why am I feeling this way? What has changed? What is there more of? What is there less of?
Become better at recognizing the signs of a looming backslide and pay close attention to the areas of our lives that have the greatest impact, ensuring they never slip too far out of hand.
Nicholas Bate refers to this regular checking in as "taking your MEDS" or more specifically, paying attention to:

- Mindfulness
- Exercise
- Diet
- Sleep

Once I recognize which of these areas has changed, its simpler (not necessarily easier) to recognize the issue and start fixing it. Sometimes the changes aren't in my control, so I need to look for ways of finding slow by creating more opportunities for a moment of deep breathing or paying close attention to whats in front of me. But other times, I've simply lost sight of what works, and its a matter of adding more of these things I've neglected- Mindfulness, simplicity, kindness- and reducing the things that don't serve me well.
Above all else, though, I simply go back to my Why.
I call to mind the foundation of this life I want. The vivid imaging of a life well lived. The loved ones, the generosity, the adventure, and the world I want to leave behind. And if that feels too big, I call to mind even smaller reminders, like the warm pressure of my kids hands in mine, the wholeness of a good conversation with Ben, the lightness of simply sitting quietly.
Our Why is the antidote to overload. Its a call back to the important things and a reminder that we don't need to carry the weight of everything- only those things that are important to us.”
― Brooke McAlary, Slow: Simple Living for a Frantic World

“When I was sixteen I read ten books a week: E.E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster--but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes...For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“The lesson was that in walking, the authentic sign of assurance is a good slowness. What I mean is a sort of slowness that isn’t exactly the opposite of speed. In the first place it’s the extreme regularity of paces, a uniformity. Here one might almost say that a good walker glides, or perhaps that his legs rotate, describing circles. A bad walker may sometimes go fast, accelerate, then slow down. His movements are jerky, his legs form clumsy angles. His speed will be made of sudden accelerations, followed by heavy breathing. Large voluntary movements, a new decision every time the body is pushed or pulled, a red perspiring face. Slowness really is the opposite of haste.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Ah! the joys of linger...”
― Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...

“El amor, por definición, es un regalo no merecido; ser amado sin mérito es incluso la prueba de un amor verdadero.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“Time did exist here, in small amounts (well some of the time) – and there were feint eddies and currents of time here, things that were barely tangible. Feint forces of the universe they were, nearly indiscernible from the nothingness like a warm breeze on a hot summer night. How long he had been here, he knew not – but he was slowly learning to master these barely tangible waves like a new surfer with one foot on the sandy beach and the other on a shiny new board of Hatred. Revenge splashed around his feet like the cold waves of the ocean of Time. Nearby, two other inmates collided with each other, bounced apart spread-eagled and spiraled off into the distance in infinite slowness. The Wetsuit of Insanity clung to his spiritual body, isolating him from the timelessness that seemed to exist here. A wind of Change blew at him from behind and he pushed off from the beach with iron determination and a mental clarity hereto before unknown to him. Something in the microcosm that didn’t even have a name went ‘bling’ and against all the laws of probability, Brad Xyl opened his eyes.”
― Christina Engela, The Time Saving Agency

“Now that he had accepted the slowness of himself, he took pleasure in the distance he covered.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“Ce n’est pas par goût de la souffrance que j’use mes semelles mais parce que la lenteur révèle des choses cachées par la vitesse.”
― Sylvain Tesson, Petit traité sur l'immensité du monde

“The way contemporary history is told is like a huge concert where they present all of Beethoven’s one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose,
or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole.”
― Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?

“Every night I want to be Heathcliff with Cathy tapping at the window. I want to be Hamlet on the windy battlements. I want the Flying Dutchman to dock. I want what everyone who has lost someone wants: a visitation.

Every second, someone dying is promising to come back from the dead. Every hour, waiting for it to happen, someone living notches up another hour lost.

For the Dead, time stops. For the living, time slows. I am in slow-motion now. It takes me twice as long to clean my teeth, half the morning to make coffee and wash the cup. When I go shopping, I don't remember what I need.

That's because it's you I need. I stare at the bag of potatoes, the packet of bacon. Absurd. Go home.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Night Side of the River

“How like her, though, just to stand and stare at the jets hitting the water. She loved to notice things. Had taught Judith how to be still in a world that moved too quick. "We're not mice," she used to say. "There's no need to scurry.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Night Side of the River

“I often look to men to model behavior," she goes on after a pause. "Not because I want to squelch what’s feminine about me, but because sometimes I want a little more action, a little less feeling in my interactions. I’ve been doing this thing lately where I try to talk slower at meetings. I take a lot of meetings with women and we all talk really fast. But every guy talks so much slower. Maybe there’s a scientist who could tell me why, but I think men are just a little bit more comfortable taking up conversational real estate. So I’ve been seeing how slow I can tolerate talking. I’m doing it now. Let me tell you, it’s really hard for me.”
― Amy Poehler

“Pono always say slow-motion vulgar.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“In modern time slowness is new sickness.”
― Amit Kalantri

“I swear if Washington moved any slower, we could be at war and it would all be over before they could even lift their sluggish, naked, dead asses off of their comfortable heated-seat toilets. -Fitzhugh to Captain Jeeter”
― Ray Palla, H: Infidels of Oil

“We will be old and gray before ten Maine minutes go by. Mainers invented tantric sex when they had a quickie.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Holidays with Bigfoot

“I used to think the quiet patches felt dead. Now they feel more alive. Like leaning over and listening to the earth's heartbeat.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“we must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves”
― Will Durant, Ariel Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“How not to think of loss,

how it takes hold and grows: like lacuna
snails, slow and deliberate, on a reed?

Why is everything I see the past
I've tried to forget?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“Much changes in eighteen months on earth, in the age of acceleration that began around the turn of the millennium and still continues to this day. All our stories are told more quickly now, we are addicted to the acceleration, we have forgotten the pleasures of the old slownesses, of the dawdles, the browses, the three-volume novels, the four-hour motion pictures, the thirteen-episode drama series, the pleasures of duration, of lingering. Do what you have to do, tell your story, live your life, get out quickly, spit spot.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing--a life so slow it constantly verges on tedium, but pondered enough never to find itself there.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet