Stop-Time Quotes

“I could not resist the clarity of the world in books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality. I hadn't made up my own mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end.”
― Frank Conroy, Stop-time

“Sadness crept over me—a sadness I didn’t question, a sadness so profound I understood it could not have come from life, or any source within my conceptual scope, but instead seeped into me from the very air, from the whole extant universe in which I was less than a speck, sadness that was not emotion but the awareness of vast emptinesses.”
― Frank Conroy, Stop-Time: A Memoir

“I could not resist the clarity of the world in books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality. I hadn’t made up my mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end.”
― Frank Conroy, Stop-Time: A Memoir

“I stood as if listening to music, and in something like the way we are told suns are born, that specks of matter in nearly empty space begin to fall, rushing across vast distances toward a hot sphere of turbulence and unimaginable density, in such a way my body, which only a moment ago as I’d watched the cat might best have been described as a vapor, a dimly perceived cloud around my soul, began to coalesce.”
― Frank Conroy, Stop-Time: A Memoir

“A large color plate of a cat statue caught my eye and I gazed at it for several moments, my mind empty of thought. Without an ego, one simply looks. The image of the cat, entirely whole and entirely static, is a signal to the mind to come to rest. There is no immediate sense of beauty, only the act of seeing.”
― Frank Conroy, Stop-Time: A Memoir