Quotes About Reflection

Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do, and by then whatever we've done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer. 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.

Maybe, as the old lady had suggested, it was all that catechism, its rote insistence on subordinating one's will to God's, so many of these lessons administered by the now senile priest who was seated a few yards away and giving him the evil eye. What in the world could these old goats have been discussing, Miles wondered.

Really? When? Had all his material become threadbare? After thirty years of marriage, were you supposed to come up with new stuff all the time?

Life may be a grand folly, as you say, but it is harder to appriciate the joke when you're always the butt of it.

No. Simplicity and justice require that thought and deed not be carelessly elided.

Ah, fuck the past, right?" And when Miles offered no opinion on whether this was either possible or advisable, his eyes narrowed. "My boy Zack's

Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there's but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.

Wondrous! he thought, how the heart leaps when one is chosen, especially later in life, after one would suppose the time for choosing and being chosen has passed.

Had I been more, I'd be more. Simple.

This would be especially true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote.

Richard Russo

People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.

A writer has to see things twice. First the thing itself, then its potential for a story. What he sees this second time is, in a sense, who he is. It's his artistic personality. What he doesn't see twice is just as revealing.

Jesus, sixty-six years old. He'd hoped that by now he wouldn't have to be so vigilant, that given enough time the madness--because that's what his spells amounted to--would ebb.

As always, to Sully, the deepest of life's mysteries were the mysteries of his own behavior.

The best she was able to do was to reflect that people invariably exhibited the very worst side of their flawed natures when invited to put their thoughts into writing, especially when the invitation was sanctioned hit-and-run posing as democracy in action. Here

Since turning in his resignation, he'd been wondering what he might do next. Suddenly his path seemed clear. He would become an alcoholic. He

I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read.

Man starts thinking this late in life, no previous experience or proper guidance, there's no telling where it could lead.

everybody romanticized old people, seeing in them their own lost parents and grandparents, most of whom had bequeathed to their children the usual legacy of guilt, along with the gift of selective recollection.

The best she was able to do was to reflect that people invariably exhibited the very worst side of their flawed natures when invited to put their thoughts into writing, especially when the invitation was sanctioned hit-and-run posing as democracy in action.

Man starts thinking this late in life, no previous experience or proper guidance

At three in the morning Main Street was so quiet that Dallas could hear the street light change from red to green a block away. There was nothing sadder and lonelier in the world, he decided, especially when you were all alone when it happened.

To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama's enemy.