Midlife and the Great Unknown Quotes

“The summation of a person’s life is the sum of what they held in their affections. This natural gravity field, this natural gravity well of belonging, which finds a particular coloration according to the way we’re made, is the secret keep to compassion.”
― David Whyte, Midlife and the Great Unknown: Finding Courage and Clarity Through Poetry

“The room is still quite cold when the list of achievements is read but the atmosphere quickens when you hear what they loved, what they held in their affections…you realize what you learn you have lost [in someone dying] is you’ve lose what they loved and everything else is like chafe blown away.”
― David Whyte, Midlife and the Great Unknown: Finding Courage and Clarity Through Poetry

“You have a moment in the day, as Blake said, that Satan (the strategic mind, worried about being ‘productive’) cannot find.”
― David Whyte, Midlife and the Great Unknown: Finding Courage and Clarity Through Poetry

“The harvest will be different now in your midlife.”
― David Whyte, Midlife and the Great Unknown: Finding Courage and Clarity Through Poetry

“In the contemplative Christian tradition, to be humiliated is to be returned to the ground of your being.”
― David Whyte, Midlife and the Great Unknown: Finding Courage and Clarity Through Poetry

“One of the clichéd human answers to stress and overwork is to increase your speed and your velocity…

The great tragedy of this approach is that you cannot recognize anything or anyone who is not traveling at the same velocity you are and you become a stranger to the slower, longer cycles of existence … and you find it hard to have compassion for anyone [at a slower pace] … you are afraid of stopping and they are reminding you that there is a part of the world that does periodically stops and takes a breath before it moves again. You don’t know who you’d be if you stopped and you get quite resentful … a kind of existential impatience and lack of generosity which comes from stressful approach to work.”
― David Whyte, Midlife and the Great Unknown: Finding Courage and Clarity Through Poetry

“Cavanaugh says to be constantly describing yourself and to think you know who you are and to be constantly explaining to others is a gospel of despair. To be yourself and to put yourself in conversation with others and to overhear yourself saying things you didn’t know you knew, this is more like the truth, this is more like the poetic imagination … and the weakness of the prose, according to Cavanaugh, is the person who tries to get to a given goal in a staight line.”
― David Whyte, Midlife and the Great Unknown: Finding Courage and Clarity Through Poetry