Quotes About Inwardness

In that case I was a somnambulist — was living, without knowing it, that double, mysterious life which makes us doubt whether there are not two beings in us — whether a strange, unknowable, and invisible being does not, during our moments of mental and physical torpor, animate the inert body, forcing it to a more willing obedience than it yields to ourselves.

she thought that something unexpressed in herself came forth and became a part of an unexpressed something in them.

I have always been considerably addicted to my own company.

She once told me that she loved me because I was the only thing she could hear. She can feel the vibration of the strings through the carved vessel of her instrument, but I am inside her. I am a song soaked into each bone of her secret body where the world has not been able to wander.

I'm not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I've gotten from books.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.

Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn't be the person I am, I wouldn't understand what I understand, were it not for certain books. I'm thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.

The ethical task of the modern writer is to be not a creator but a destroyer - a destroyer of shallow inwardness, the consoling notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity, and empty phrases.

Don't tell me what I'm doing; I don't want to know.

I think Mr. Wilson will have to be the rest of the way alone.

whichever of my friends was and is sensitive, touchy even, had to choose... emigration... and I emigrated inwardly, here to the pub for example...

I've built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself

Dentro de mi, alguien, algo, se irá. Con la mirada baja, sin una palabra.

I've built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself. Who could like somebody like that?

Celui qui n'est pas passionné devient tout au plus un pédagogue; c'est toujours par l'intérieur qu'il faut aller aux choses, toujours, toujours en partant de la passion.

He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who's learned to love the sensation of being pierced.

She preferred those occupations that require no companion. She walked alone, rad alone, sat alone in the sittingroom or in the ray of faint sunshine which sometimes penetrated the little courtyard ab about one o'clock. She was less open-hearted and confiding than before; it was as if someone -- not necessarily Jonathan Strange -- had disappointed her and she was determined to be more independent in future.

I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.

But there it is: Everyone is alone, for life, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.

I've always said that, growing up in postwar Japan, I never felt any connection to my work through those experiences. The work I do really comes from inside myself. For me, being born in Japan was an accident.

Stick a lighted candle up your backside to give yourself that inner glow.

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.