Quotes About Reflection

A person could leave you so quickly. So much history and time and memories, but they snuck away from you, and other things took their place. How could you hold on? Wait. A bigger question. The biggest. How could you hold on and let go?

wanting things for the wrong reasons can turn anyone's life into a marshmallow on a stick over a hot fire: impossibly messy and eventually consumed, one way or another.

Sometimes I've even wished there was a human pause button, where you could choose some point in your life where you could stay always.

Maybe some people just had trouble with forever.

Beaches, music, and car rides—they could all bring on a sudden bout of deep, dreamy thoughts.

Have you worked here long?" Sebastian asks. Just a few months," I say. "Do you come here a lot?" As if you don't know, Jade. I used to come every day, or, you know, when I could, I'd bring Bo after work. Or just myself." At night sometimes. You'd climb the fence. You'd watch the stars. You'd tilt back your head and look at the sky. You'd think it over, whatever it was.

Because that's how it works after something terrible has happened. You know this is true if something terrible has ever happened to you. A thousand objects take on new meaning. Everything is a reminder of something else.

she wonders if we feel more regret for the things we do or for the things we didn't do

But, dear God, don't listen to me. I'm an old lady in the middle of nowhere without a real toilet.

It's funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we've committed some crime.

Blessed books--they're a place to be alone, and no one else can come in.

I kept trying to talk myself out of my second thoughts when they were trying to help me. My advice? When it comes to relationships, second thoughts should be promoted.

It was strange to have those papers signed. Like any big project or crisis that takes every waking and non-waking moment in your life, it was odd to have it concluded. A move, a college degree, a wedding--something long-strived-for is completed, whatever the outcome, and there is a huge space where it all once was. All that open time now, and a continuing nagging sense that there's something you need to be doing.

But I didn't want to share everything yet… I needed that time alone with it first, that delicious time where you replay every moment, where you make what has happened more real and also less—it becomes fact the more you repeat it, but it becomes story, too.

He's going for wisdom but the real wisdom is knowing there sometimes isn't any.

Us frogs understand this.

There are those moments, probably few in a life, where before and after split off from each other forevermore in your mind.

The past is a good place for the past.

Books make you feel things hard.

Something has happened to her and about her, and yet it is hard to grasp this fact. Her run is larger than her, and yet her daily life is mostly just her solitary steps, the rhythm of them, her daily aches, her loneliness, and the flashes of the nightmares that she experiences daily. It seems that she's become a person with a message, but she's unclear what the message is. Maybe because the message is still fighting its way through the grief and guilt to get to her.

Our memories and events in our lives are untidy things. We wish that we can file them away and shut the door, or wish the opposite - that they would stay forever.

That night, after we turned out the light, the red digital numbers of the bedside clock stared me down. I tried to ignore it, but of all household objects, bedside clocks are the most insistent, more than beeping refrigerators and door alarms, more than kitchen timers and even blaring radios. It's the strong silent types that get you.

Each story, good and bad, short or long--from that trip to the mall when you saw Santa, to a long, bad illness--they are all a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. Two thirds of the way through, even, and it all won't necessarily make sense, but at the end there'll be a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter fits.

A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh.