David Abram Quotes

#1. What we say has such a profound influence upon what we see, and hear, and taste of the world!

David Abram

#2. To describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we spontaneously experience them, prior to all our conceptualizations and definitions.

David Abram

#3. One's relation to one's house, in other words, is hardly a relation between a pure subject and a pure object - between an active intelligence, or mind, and a purely passive chunk of matter.

David Abram

#4. Along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.

David Abram

#5. Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.

David Abram

#6. Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils-all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness.

David Abram

#7. The world we experience with our unaided senses is fluid and animate, shifting and transforming in response to our own shifts of position and of mood.

David Abram

#8. Breathing involves a continual oscillation between exhaling and inhaling, offering ourselves to the world at one moment and drawing the world into ourselves at the next ...

David Abram

#9. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

David Abram

#10. We cannot experience any entity in its totality, because we are not pure, disembodied minds, but are palpable bodies with our own opacities and limits.

David Abram

#11. Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world.

David Abram

#12. Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.

David Abram

#13. It was a though we'd been living for a year in a dense grove of old trees, a cluster of firs, each with its own rhythm and character, from whom our bodies had drawn not just shelter but perhaps even a kind of guidance as we grew into a family.

David Abram

#14. Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.

David Abram

#15. It's weird, you know, the way so many people accept the notion that stone is inanimate, that rock doesn't move. I mean, really, this here cliff moves me every time that I see it.

David Abram

#16. We like to assume that language is a purely human property, our exclusive possession, and that everything else is basically mute.

David Abram

#17. The friendship between my hand and this stone enacts an ancient and irrefutable eros, the kindredness of matter with itself.

David Abram

#18. If we speak of things as inert or inanimate objects, we deny their ability to actively engage and interact with us - we foreclose their capacity to reciprocate our attentions, to draw us into silent dialogue, to inform and instruct us.

David Abram

#19. There are so many unsung heroines and heroes at this broken moment in our collective story, so many courageous persons who, unbeknownst to themselves, are holding together the world by their resolute love or contagious joy. Although I do not know your names, I can feel you out there.

David Abram

#20. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly "inert" letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless - as mysterious as a talking stone.

David Abram

#21. Does the human intellect, or "reason," really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of forms? Or on the contrary, is the human intellect rooted in, and secretly borne by, our forgotten contact with the multiple nonhuman shapes that surround us on every hand?

David Abram

#22. is the mountain that lends its gregarious power to the multiple elements of this place.

David Abram

#23. For magicians -- whether modern entertainers or indigenous, tribal sorcerers -- have in common the fact that they work with the malleable texture of perception.

David Abram

#24. Sensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem.

David Abram

#25. We are too frightened of shadows. We cannot abide our vulnerability, our utter dependence upon a world that can eat us. Vast in its analytic and inventive power, modern humanity is crippled by a fear of its own animality, and of the animate earth that sustains us.

David Abram