Quotes About Reflection

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

La superviviente del holocausto Corrie Ten Boom dijo: «Si miras el mundo, te angustiarás. Si miras dentro de ti, te deprimirás. Pero si miras a Cristo, encontrarás descanso».

I'm always so glad, Sylvie murmured, that I don't have to take a turn at being other people.

She fingered the strand of pearls at her neck. Inside each pearl was a little piece of grit. That was the true self of the pearl wasn't it? The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself. From the grit. From the truth.

Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one's fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept. A monkish thought that he dismissed.

It had been a while since Juliet had shared her bed with anyone. There had been a few, but she thought of them as mistakes rather than lovers

do a typing and shorthand

I'm a shadow of my former self, she announces. Vinny was a shadow to begin with, now she's a shadow of a shadow.

Everyone she worked alongside in France had been insatiable letter-writers and resolute diary-keepers, but Gwendolen had felt no urge to chronicle, no desire for an aide-mémoire. Life was for absorbing, not recording. And in the end, it was all just paper that someone would have to dispose of after you were gone. Perhaps, after all, one's purpose in this world was to be forgotten, not remembered.

She wanted to be left alone in peace, to disappear into her own quiet world and meditate upon death. Death. Yes, she could form that blunt, obscene word too. But instead she was the one who was going to have to be kind and strong and say that everything was going to be all right (which it clearly was not) and that she had come to terms with it.

You are an old soul," he said. "It can't be easy. But your life is still ahead of you. It must be lived.

Her grandfather was dying of old age, Bertie thought. Worn out. Not cancer or a heart attack or an accident or a catastrophe. Old age seemed like a hard way to go.

Sometimes, when she found herself mired in the twin duties of marriage and motherhood, she thought how her life had been compromised by love.

Part of him died during the war. This was just the rest of him catching up," and she put her finger to the corner of her eye and dabbed at a trace of moisture there—a tear would have been too generous a description.

She no longer recognized herself, she thought. She had taken the wrong path, opened the wrong door, and was unable to find her way back.

Some might count sheep. Teddy counted the towns and cities he had tried to destroy, that had tried to destroy him. Perhaps they had succeeded.

Aren't I happy?' Ursula puzzled. What do you think? Ursula didn't know. She wasn't sure that she had a yardstick against which to measure happiness or unhappiness. She had obscure memories of elation, of falling into darkness, but they belonged to that world of shadows and dreams that was ever-present and yet almost impossible to pin down.

She was flawed, no longer intact. On the other hand, she felt as if she had been scourged clean. The past no longer weighed so heavily on the present.

Once upon a time Jackson had erased his past, now his past had erased him.

Ursula found herself dwelling on Hugh's death, his absence more than his death.

Was I really such a terrible mother?' she asked Bertie. 'Why the past tense?' Bertie said. Sow and reap.

the nonconception of beloved children always a stumbling block to the if-I-could-live-my-life-over-again fantasy).

O passado é aquilo que transportamos connosco

but nonetheless once you hit fifty there was no escaping the fact that you had a one-way ticket on a nonstop service to the terminus.