Quotes About Reflection

Seventeen years ago, I discovered from my own brain-scanning experiment that I had brain cancer. From the waiting room on the tenth floor of the oncology building, I remember looking down at people in the street—distant and oblivious, going about their everyday life. I had been cast out of that life, separated from its goal-oriented busyness and from its promises of joy, by the prospect of a probable early death.

Why does it help to read others' stories? It is not only that misery loves company, because (I learned) misery is too self-absorbed to want much company. Others' experiences did help with my emotional struggle...

Nic is writing 'I am sorry', and I want to cry. No, I think, don't let him in again. No don't let him in again. No don't let him in again.

As much as a child's birthday is important to a parent, as much as twenty one meant to me, a year in recovery means more.

I think, How innocent we are of our mistakes and how responsible we are for them.

Don't confront me with my failures. I have not forgotten them.

But you know, I don't think I will be so scared to die. I think it's like today: the end of a vacation when you are ready to go home.

In my first group, a counselor asked me why i'm here. he said, 'What's your problem? I said ' i'm a drug addict and an alcoholic.' he shook his head. 'no.' he said, 'that's how you've been treating your problem. what is your problem?

Nonetheless: if only and if only and if only.

sometimes a warrior's task is to sit with defeat.

I wish someone had shaken me and said, "Intervene while you can before it's too late." It may not have made a difference, but I don't know.

But you know, I don't think I would be so scared to die. I think it's like today—the end of a vacation, when you are ready to go home.

I never planned to pray. I just looked back and realized I had been praying. …. What did I pray for?

I go back, this time to a swankier neighborhood.

I can try to forgive myself, whether or not she forgives me, because I was a child, but some things you just live with because you cannot go backward.

I have a daughter who reminds me too much of what I used to be, full of love and joy, kissing every person she meets because everyone is good and will do her no harm. And that terrifies me to the point to where I can barely function. —KURT COBAIN, in his suicide note

How innocent we are of our mistakes and how responsible we are for them.

in the San Francisco Bay Area, where one out of every three people seem to be a therapist of some sort. What does this say about us? Scott Peck said that the sickest and healthiest people are in therapy. Which are we?

I'm drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking

Deep down, you know you're him.

The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it"—

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means.

autobiography is concerned with the consciousness of its creator in the process of creating himself.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.