Quotes About Reflection

He'd been a great one for looking for greener pastures. He'd kept looking until all his pastures were brown with time.

If it had been me, I would have done the same thing, remained silent, then died.

And it does occur to me that, as I sit here in no pain at all, some not inconsiderable number of my contemporaries are suffering every bit as much pain as any cave painter suffered, and asking themselves exactly what principle it is by which a long life is thought better than a short life.

If we think only the thoughts that are customary to us, and listen only to the words of those who are of our mind, we are little likely to find refreshment and renewal in our minds, and thus all too likely to suppose that we have come to the end of all deliberations that we have to make.

She said that time was like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. She meant you could never go back. But of course we had. She'd taken me back.

As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.

I read because one life isn't enough, and in the pages of a book I can be anybody

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you

We write by the light of every book we've read.

I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody.

It was always August.

Are all my memories true? Every word, and growing truer with the years.

You were not cut out for a quiet life because you are honest to a fault. A man can want something to the point of indecency, he said, and when he attains his goal, it is ashes in his mouth and a bad conscience. The twentieth century did not look to be an age with any patience for the past.

Why do we do inefficient things? Because sometimes we don't want life to be seamless—we want to feel resistance, we want to take our time, we want to savor the experience. When what you're doing isn't just a means to an end, you're in no hurry to get it done.

We process information so efficiently that we don't dwell on thoughts and words anymore—we flit incoherently from one set of distractions to the next.

Maybe to save time is not to lengthen life, after all. Maybe the more efficiently you speed through life, the quicker you reach your death.

Someday you'll need to take down a worn-out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

On the ride back south, she tapped all the anger-management tricks they'd given her in job training. They played across her windshield like PowerPoint slides. Number One: It's not about you. Number Two: Your plan is not the world's. Number Three: The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Plant-blind. Adam's curse. We only see things that look like us.

For a moment, looking felt like something that happened to you rather than something you did. Not 'Are you who I think you are?' Am I who you think I am?

Time didn't age you; memory did.