Quotes About Reflection

This is not a novel about a woman leaving home, but rather a human being finding her way back.

Already I've seen that when you're pulled away from your normal routine, it's as though air and sunlight come into your brain and do a little housecleaning.

IF YOU COULD LIVE ONE day in your life over again and change the outcome of something that happened that day, what day would it be?

You are where I unlock myself, where I say that I have often put down my wooden spoon to stare out the kitchen window to see the men I thought were magic for their story-telling or their way of walking, or the ones I was so strongly sexually attracted to, even though they weren't good people - at least not for me.

Life has its way, and it seems to me now that the object might only be to learn how to be graceful, to understand the value of a deep kind of acceptance.

Everybody has thoughts that shame them. You can't control them coming in, but you don't have to let them all out. That's the crux of it.

I look in the mirror now, and even if I lost weight, there's just...Theres' nothing I can do. It's over. My bodyness. My attractiveness in my body. I can diet forever but it will never make me like I was.

It's like you let your mind stay in its pajamas

I throw sticks for him, and it comes to me that it is a miracle I am able to do this: use my arm, full strength. Follow the course of the stick clearly. Walk without fatigue or pain. Assume, with blind confidence, that I will be able to do this tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. Spend an afternoon with someone who has been told their number is up, and you will will regard everything you do later that day with grateful wonder. I mean, even laundry.

feels that everything that just happened between them is a pretty illusion, a ride on a carousel. Here is his world: Sadie.

I felt my aloneness like a coat. You think you get used to death in the dying. But after the dying is done, you see how the end is the beginning.

every so often, just to keep

I see where all this success has led me. Now I want to see what it's kept me from.

She thinks it was Margaret Atwood who said that wanting to meet a writer because you like their work was like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté. So

he was learning a lot about the kind of loneliness some people endured. He

But you know what usually happens when you take a vacation to a place that galvanizes you and makes you feel like you're going to change your life. You come home and get right back into your old habits. Meanwhile, a slow fire burns. A

YOU COULD LIVE ONE day in your life over again and change the outcome of something that happened that day, what day would it be? This is a question many people have difficulty answering. Not Iris Winters. She knows the day, and she knows exactly how she'd change what happened.

I go up to my room, close the door and sit on my bed, my hands clasped in my lap, and in my chest is a raggedy sadness. Outside, the sun hangs at the horizon, then drops. Day is done. (page 60)

you think that your pushing me so hard for something you wanted made me kind of necessarily resist it? Would you admit that, would you say that you pushed way too hard?

A human being writes the book, but what writes for him or her is more spirit than physical being, and that spirit lives only in solitude.

too. So you see that all my big mistake did was to make for a better party because that's how mistakes are, they make for a kind of relaxation, at least on the part of those not making them.

sometimes grief made people eat a lot, grief and the realization that life really did come to an end.

Don't ask so many questions. You always ask so many questions. Don't do that. Just...accept things. ...Don't ask questions and don't look back. Believe me you'll be much more content.

knew it in my brain, anyway; but I was nonetheless reminded of it in my heart in these unexpected and most random of ways. I can only describe it as the way you touch something bare-handed that you just took from the oven. Impossible as it seems, every now and