Quotes About Reflection

I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?

We don't forgive people because they deserve it," she said. "We forgive them because we deserve it.

We wear the chains we forge in life

No, Sully'd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn't, any more than he'd blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn't pay to second-guess every one of life's decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older.

So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy.

Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you? Sully: Not often. Now and then.

Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.

You get more misanthropic every day. - I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.

Perfect silence. This in response to Sully's key being turned in the ignition of the pickup.

Slow, tick decides. Thinks happen slow. she isn't quite sure why this understanding of the world's movement should be important, but she thinks it is. ...Take her parents- At the time, their separation had seemed a bolt from the blue, though she now realizes it had been a slow process, rooted in dissatisfaction and need....Mybe

Hell, at twenty, he'd been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago.

Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

For years now he'd believed he had no further urgent business with this world, or it with him. But it could be he was wrong.

That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about—acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind.

I put myself up for full professor, an act of such unprecedented and unmitigated arrogance that the committee approved it, thus effectively rooting me to the scene of the crime, too weighed down by tenure, rank, and salary to be marketable ever again.

Rub wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I just wisht—" "What?" Rub sighed. Where to begin? "That I'd be nicer to you?" He shrugged again, but this was the gist of it, Sully could tell. "I wish I would, too," he said, and for some reason this seemed to cheer Rub up.

Lincoln chuckled yet again. "What's that poem you're always quoting? About parents?" Teddy nodded. "Larkin.

You can do things his way, or you can wish you had.

the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own. Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do...Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

No, most adults are like her father, whose fear, if he feels any, has been replaced by a kind of melancholy.

I don't dislike Gracie. At least I don't dislike her when I think about her. When I'm in one place and she's in another. It's when she's near enough to backhand that back-handing her always seems like a good idea. This is true of several of my colleagues, actually, though they don't bother me in the abstract.

Nor do I want the woman that I'm married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not.