Quotes About Reflection

Ich vermochte kaum den Kopf hochzuhalten. Ich wollte mich befreien, dem Gefängnis meiner Erinnerung entfliehen.

My self and my other selves, both past and yet to come, were equally present.

What we leave behind in this life is the memory of who we were and what we did. An imprint, no more. I have learned much. I have become wise. But have I made a difference? I cannot tell.

If we do not remember those who have gone before us, we are destined to repeat the same mistakes. We walk blind through

And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.

Wherever you go, the most of life will have to happen in your mind.

once the mind has known and wrestled with happiness, it has secured as good a shield as may be found against the loneliness of time—

I don't know how others reconcile what happened before with what happens now. For me, the past is a cool, dark pond in which I will always stand partially submerged. That's just the way it is.

Someone once told me a memory is just another draft of a story.

From here there is never not a day without Master's shadow across my life—a solid bar, a locked turnstile that brings me up short, trapped on the other side of where I thought I was going, the place I once imagined I would be.

In the months to come, I would look back on this time in my life almost as a kind of out-of-body travel, from which I had returned with nothing but a sense memory of having been somewhere inexpressibly exciting and far away. It wasn't like a dream, exactly, although it had a dream's strange internal logic. It was like looking through the window of an airplane at night, the way the city below appears so near, yet untouchable beyond the glass--a network of lights, flames, stars.

Some questions don't have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn.

People react in such complicated ways to any death, but particularly to the death of a parent, because a lot of what one feels is about oneself and the sense that nothing now stands between that self and dying. You have now become the older generation. I believe that the closer and more loving the relationship is, the deeper but simpler the grief. Of my father's children, my brother had the hardest time

The end result of all this was that many of us, by middle age, arrived at the state we were trying most to avoid: we bored our husbands, who had done their fair share in helping reduce us to this condition, and they wandered off to younger, greener pastures.

He, who hated to hurt people, had to begin to deal with all the hurt his actions had wrought—for me, for the children, for Robin, for himself.

It's hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink nondecisions. Sometimes you don't really decide, you just move forward, and that is what I did—moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life.

We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers - but never blame yourself. It's never your fault. But it's always your fault, because if you wanted to change you're the one who has got to change.

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

I have many regrets, and I'm sure everyone does. The stupid things you do, you regret if you have any sense, and if you don't regret them, maybe you're stupid.

The past is never where you think you left it.

A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.

The past is never where you think you left it: you are not the same person you were yesterday—oh

The whiskey looks like transparent wood in my glass.

It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.