A Quote by James Turrell

I was maybe 5 or 6, and my grandmother would begin sitting me in the Quaker meeting house. I asked my grandmother, 'What am I supposed to do?' and she said, 'Just wait, we're going inside to greet the light.' I liked that—this idea to go inside to find that light within, literally as well as figuratively.
One of the tenets in Quaker meditation is that you 'go inside to greet the light.' I am interested in this light that's inside greeting the light that's outside.
One day, I was at my grandmother's house, and I found diaries that she kept as a young girl. I opened one to a page that had flowers glued inside. In her childish handwriting, my grandmother wrote, 'Pap died today. I am very sad.' The fact that this was true and that I could see the withered flowers made a huge impression on me.
I studied piano from the age of three. My grandmother taught piano. I stayed at her house during the day while my parents worked. I obviously wanted to learn to play. And so she asked if she could teach me, and my mother said don't you think she's too young. My grandmother apparently said no. So I could read music before I could read, and I really don't remember learning to read music. So for me it's like a native language. When I look at a sheet of music, it just makes sense.
My grandmother's house - she ran it just like her grandmother and her great-grandmother. They didn't have electricity. They had wood stoves that never got cold.
Our success and our understanding is that all beings are right inside, the deeper we go inside ourselves. There's a saying that Unity uses that I have always liked: "Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me." We all have to be a part of this. We have to be the initiator. We can't wait.
My grandmother lived on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy, and she used to go to church every day. She'd go in, light a candle, she'd pray, and as a child, that was comforting to me.
The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me. "The big show is inside my head," I said.
Not so cold, some snow fell. I went inside the log cabin and said goodbye to Mother, she was so alike grandmother, just younger.
When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: 'If you have love, even plain water is sweet.
My first deepening of spirituality came when I was 6, when I was moved from my grandmother and sent to live with my mother - whom I really did not know - who had moved to Milwaukee. Something inside myself knew that I was never going to see my grandmother again - I would be wasting my time to live in that space of wanting that.
What kind of grandmother am I? I'm a 'three-dessert' grandmother. I'm a 'let's just skip the bath tonight, honey, watch another video' grandmother.
The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light...It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within that great general light of existence.
My grandmother was a typical farm-family mother. She would regularly prepare dinner for thirty people, and that meant something was always cooking in the kitchen. All of my grandmother's recipes went back to her grandmother.
What was so moving for [Diane Wilson], and also for me, is that she felt the Bay itself was like her grandmother. She said, "I don't think there's a woman alive who would give up fighting for her child, or her mother, or her grandmother."
I'll impose upon you the same arrogance that was imposed on me, and on my mother, my grandmother, my grandmother's mother: all the way back to the first human born of another human being, whether he liked it or not. Probably, if he or she had been allowed to choose, he would have been frightened and answered: No, I don't want to be born. But no one asked their opinion, and so they were born and lived and died after giving birth to another human being who was not asked to choose, and that one did likewise, for millions of years, right down to us.
I heard a story about a woman who grew up in Texas. When she was having trouble in her life, she would visit her grandmother, who lived nearby and always had a kind word and some wisdom to pass on. One day she was complaining to her grandmother about some situation and her grandmother just turned to her, smiled sadly, and said, "Sometimes, darlin', you've just got to rise above yourself in this life." I've remembered that wise advice many times as I've faced trouble in my life.
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