Quotes About Reflection

Dad is looking at the bookshelves, deep in thought, deciding which book should go where. Once, Mom came home from work and discovered that he had turned all the books around so that the bindings were against the wall and the pages faced out. He said it was calming not to have all those words floating around and "creating static." Mom made him turn them back. She said it was too hard to find a book when she couldn't read the titles. Then she poured herself a big glass of wine.

I wish I could see what would have hapenned if I hadn't told. You told me once that every time a decision is made, the universe splits into two. So now there's a universe in which I kept my mouth shut. But I can't see what it looks like.

Trying to forget really doesn't work. In fact, it's pretty much the same as remembering. But I tried to forget anyway, and to ignore the fact that I was remembering you all the time.

You are allowed to make mistakes. And to be forgiven.

Life was anything but fast, in your opinion. If it went any more slowly, time would probably start to run backward.

It's weird, because I know Mom is right about the big picture. But Dad is right too: Life is really just a bunch of nows, one after the other. The dots matter.

Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean. It's like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten. And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to.

On the way up, it hit me that it was truly strange to come over here without talking to Annemarie first. But at the exact same time I got nervous about that, I also got this other feeling, which I can only describe as love for Annemarie's elevator.

Miriam says don't lie down inside a bad feeling if you can help it" - Bea

Miriam says that sometimes, when we don't want to 'look hard at our behavior,' we look hard at everything else instead...

How are you supposed to know what you want?" […] "I think that when you don't know, you should just wait until you do.

Simmy entertained slippery thoughts about identity and the meaning of any individual's span on earth. When it came right down to it, she supposed that all a person really amounted to was the sum of their memories.

I'll make some tea' she said, without consultation. The tears had not fully abated, and there were times when tea was the only thing.

It seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we've inherited or devised? When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom.

But who has time to write memoirs? I'm still living my memoirs.

I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

As we passed by on the stony causeway, women looked up at us from the fields, their faces furrowed with all known distresses. By their sides, lambs skipped in gaiety and innocence, and goats skipped in gaiety but without innocence, and at their feet the cyclamens shone mauve; the beasts and flowers seemed fortunate because they are not human, as those who have passed within the breath of a plague and have escaped it.

with her ex and didn't want to be

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us worthy evidence of the fact. —George Eliot

Old age is when broadness of the mind and narrowness of the waist change places.

toilet. And

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

I'd burned bridges between us that had yet to be built.