Quotes About Reflection

Oh, Arthur, no one even sees you when you get old except for people who knew you when you were young.

Everybody makes mistakes, sometimes even before we get up in the morning. We can't help but make mistakes. The important thing is to keep trying. And to apologize when you need to.

Make time for prayer and reflection; try to understand your value as a man on earth but see, too, your proper place in the scheme of things. It may sound funny to say this, but I have come to see that we are all far more important and less important than we think.

No one could ever be for me what [he] had been because he had known me when, and that had kept me away from the true reality of my years.

Sometimes I wonder what the world would sound like if everybody stopped their complaining. It sure would be a quiet place.

She honestly wondered sometimes which fate was worse, death or standing behind a curtain and looking out at the street at all the things you felt you could no longer have.

Nothing helped until the day she took a tablet and pencil into the basement and moved the event out of her and onto paper, where it was reshaped into a kind of simple equation: loss equaled the need to love again, more.

It seems like all the time people are making themselves themselves, but they don't really know it. You can only have true visions when you look behind. A person can slide so fast into being something they never really intended. I wonder if you can truly resurrect your own self.

aging means the abandonment of criticism and the taking on of compassionate acceptance.

Books educate and inspire, and they soothe souls -- like comfort food without the calories.

Willow trees dipped their bare branches into pond water like girls testing the temperature with their toes.

There are moments when we think nature happens just for us, and there are other moments when the ridiculousness of that notion is revealed.

I decided in high school that I wasn't going to get married too soon. I'd forgotten that you can also wait too long, and then the only candies left in the box are the squished ones, rejected for their questionable insides. And if I'm honest, I'd have to count myself among those with questionable insides.

Sometimes it seems like a little moment brings a whole world with it.

I am so often struck by what we do not do, all of us. And I am also, now, so acutely aware of the quick passage of time, the way that we come suddenly to our own separate closures. It is as though a thing says, I told you. But you thought I was just kidding.

Everybody has thoughts that shame them. You can't control them coming in. But you don't have to let them all out.

Life comes with problems, you have to accept that. And you have to try to lead the simple life; to not constantly ask questions about the whys and the wherefores of everything.

What if you determined to fin one thing every day that you -... I know. Count your blessings. Remind yourself every night of every good thing that happened to you that day. No. I'm not talking about things that happen to you. I'm talking about purposefully doing one thing that brings you happiness every single day, in a very conscious way. .......think of it more fluidly-as a philosophy that you exercise daily. And days turn into years. And then years turn into a lifetime.

She believes that her last chance for love just died, and her last chance was her first love, and there is something about that that is awfully hard to bear. Think about it. To know you're at the end of hoping for love and to realize that something else will have to do, if you're going to have any reason to go on.

Books don't take time away from us," she said. "They give it back. In this age of abstraction, of multitasking, of speed for speed's sake, they reintroduce us to the elegance—and the relief!—of real, tick-tock time.

Silence, and then, How old are you? Maddy asks, and Arthur tells her eighty-five. Then he asks her how old she is. Eighteen, she says. Almost. Eighteen. The word is a poem.

I am in agreement with Goethe, who said that every day one ought to 'hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.' I would add to this the need to love. Without it, the rest is dust.

What does anyone say to anybody who used to be so important in her life, whom she's not seen in such a long time? It seems to me that in situations like this, we're all wondering the same thing: I'm still me; are you still you? A

I should have said "powder room." That would evoke the image of me sitting before a beautiful gold mirror, a vase of fresh flowers nearby, freshening my makeup, rather than sitting on a toilet.