Quotes About Reflection

That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count. A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning. The pine she leans against says: Listen. There's something you need to hear.

He decides, for whatever years are left to him, to capture the tree and see what the thing looks like, sped up to the rate of human desire.

He waits too long, and time replies for him.

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

The past always comes clearer, in the future.

She goes on staring at the city, waiting for the city to stare back.

Quando rientrai in ufficio, l'immagine della donna che sale per le scale era diventata, a furia di riproiettarmela nella mente, una di quelle repliche di spettacoli in seconda serata di cui vorresti vedere una versione restaurata (p. 310)

During climbs into taller trees, I was occasionally able to look down on the backs of birds, which shine with reflected sunlight as they move through the green depths of the canopy, like schools of fish.

Lake of the Woods is asleep for the winter, but it is dreaming. Marie feels that she can hear the dreams of the lake running through the ice, like thoughts in a language we don't know.

If you ask a person, "What were you thinking?" you may get an answer that is richer and more revealing of the human condition than any stream of thoughts a novelist could invent.

the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.

a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child.

But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.

The character damage of a trauma survivor," he concludes, "can be understood as a reflection both of his or her radical aloneness and of the continued presence of the perpetrator in the victim's inner life.

I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knows will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee.

Rose Bethe, who was then twenty-four, understood instantly. "My wife knew vaguely what we were talking about," says Bethe, "and on a walk in the mountains in Yosemite National Park she asked me to consider carefully whether I really wanted to continue to work on this.

Men like to recall, in later years, what they said at some important or possibly historic moment in their lives. . . . I remember only too well what I said to General Somervell that day. I said, "Oh." As

Now we are all sons of bitches.' 

Do I love you because you're beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you?

The sweetest sounds I'll ever hear are still inside my head.

Blue moon ... You saw me standing alone

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.

We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.