Quotes About Reflection

As Joan Didion said, "I don't know what I think until I write about it.

When the dust has settled years later, we might ask ourselves, "What was I thinking?" and the answer is usually: You weren't. Psychologists call that state of deluded madness "narcissistic love." I call it "my twenties.

Gratitude, always. Always, gratitude.

Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.

One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I wrote this morning. In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace

I share it here because something was about to occur on that bathroom floor that would change forever the progression of my life..what happened was that I started to pray.

When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company. If you are appalled, he said, then it was a devil who had visited you. If you feel lightened, it was an angel.

The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.

Keep cultivating gratitude.

First spouses, I have learned, don't ever really go away--even if you aren't speaking to them anymore. They are phantoms who dwell in the corners of our new love stories, never entirely vanishing from sight, materializing in our minds whenever they please, offering up unwelcome comments or bits of painfully accurate criticism.

But why must everything always have a practical application? I'd been such a diligent soldier for years - working, producing, never missing a deadline, taking care of my loved ones, my gums and my credit record, voting, etc. Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty?

Hush," she said. "I'm thinking at the top of my lungs.

What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it's sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.

i honor the divinity that resides within me.

Don't rush through the experiences and circumstances that have the most capacity to transform you.

A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.

For the first time in my life, it occurred to me that perhaps I was asking too much of love. Or, at least, perhaps I was asking too much of marriage. Perhaps I was loading a far heavier cargo of expectation onto the creaky old boat of matrimony than that strange vessel had ever been built to accommodate in the first place.

There were pages and pages of this. It was a confetti of thinking. It began nowhere, led to nothing, and concluded nothing.

My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup.

sometimes you count the days, sometimes you weigh them. a

Not everything has an answer." Alma found this to be such a staggering piece of intelligence that she was struck dumb by it for several hours. All she could do was sit and ponder the notion in an amazed stupor.

When something ends, let it end.

She did a little soul-searching, the way one does on the big birthdays. She asked herself when was the last time she'd felt truly light, joyous, and—yes—creative in her own skin. To her shock, she realized that it had been decades since she'd felt that way.

But I love him. So love him. But I miss him. So miss him. Send some love and light every time you think about him, and then drop it. [...]