Closing Off Quotes:

What's encouraging about meditation is that, even if we shut down, we can no longer shut down in ignorance. We see very clearly that we're closing off. That in itself begins to illuminate the darkness of ignorance.

- Pema Chodron

topic: Buddhist, Ignorance, Meditation, Meditation Life, Closing Off

Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death, a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will.

- Coleman Dowell

source: "Mrs. October was Here".

topic: Block, Loss, Self, Infirmity, Loss Of A Friend

Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.

- David Brooks

topic: Jumping, Race, Lust, Closing Off, Frantic

If you try too carefully to plan your life, the danger is that you will succeed-succeed in narrowing your options, closing off avenues of adventure that cannot now be imagined.

- Harlan Cleveland

source: Harlan Cleveland (1972). “The Future Executive”

topic: Adventure, Trying, Succeed, Closing Off

I think closing-off is the most detrimental thing we can do as people. Also, the idea of not judging oneself.

- Carrie Brownstein

source: "Carrie Brownstein Discusses Her Memoir". Interview with Jenn Pelly, pitchfork.com. October 27, 2015.

topic: Thinking, Ideas, People, Not Judging, Closing Off

Rhyme as an echo not a closing off of sound. Love it. I don't know where the rhymes came from. Or the puns like "no/know" and so on. Just a way my mind start moving toward what seemed urgent to it. I'd like to claim complete rational intent for it all, but it wasn't that way. if you asked me about rhyme thirty years ago, I'd have said: not me, never. And now I done it.

- Gregory Orr

source: Source: therumpus.net

topic: Moving, Years, Echoes, Closing Off, Thirty Years

You know, very often, if you look at the kinds of communications that they're getting in an ISIS recruiting video, the videos that, you know, that one hears of as radicalizing them, these are like action movies. And so in the sense, it's that by closing off the idea that young Muslims and particularly young Muslim men can be American heroes, it increases the chance that they'll try to be some other kind of hero. And that, I think, is entirely counterproductive.

- Mohsin Hamid

source: Source: www.npr.org

topic: Communication, Hero, Men, Closing Off, American Hero