Quotes About Reflection

If my conscience had been a person at that moment, I might have strangled him.

I preferred solitude anyway; it was the medium in which I had been raised, in which I swam comfortably.

Every waiting season in my life has left its mark on me. I have memories, scars. And honestly? I don't mind the scars anymore. They are part of me now; I wouldn't recognize myself without them.

I often remember that dusty, ruined flat in old Beirut. And I know that a little part of me will stay there forever, laying out those treasures on the windowsill and playing at cat's cradle with my friend.

It is the acceptance of death that has finally allowed me to choose life.

If we do not suffer a loss all the way to the end, it will wait for us. It won't just dissipate and disappear. Rather, it will fester, and we will experience its sorrow later, in stranger forms.

How quickly I judge, and therefore diminish their humanity.

Over and over, we are broken on the shore of life. Our stubborn egos are knocked around, and our frightened hearts are broken open—not once, and not in predictable patterns, but in surprising ways and for as long as we live.

So much of what we do each day is a diversion from what our lives are really about. A traumatic event is like a knife slicing through our diversionary tactics and exposing the vein of truth—the truth of what we really want, of how we really feel, of the wrongs we have visited upon each other, of the love we crave from each other.

every catastrophe can hand us exactly what we need to awaken into who we really are.

Books remember all the things you cannot contain.

Other people's happiness is always a fascinating bore. It sucks the oxygen out of the room; you're left gasping, greedy, amazed by a deficit in yourself you hadn't ever noticed.

I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on, but death goes on too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story. You move on from it, , but the death will never disappear from view.

My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right and you're wrong.

You'll find, someday, Paks found herself saying, that your own tongue cuts you worse than any blade. I

it forces concentration, and thus opens up the world.

Independence of vision is a good thing," Dorrin said. "So is thinking. But speaking and acting well require reflection—consideration.

Now it was too late. That could never happen. His future lay before him, one bleak stretch of unpleasant duty, to the end of his days.

Delay also has consequences," Kieri said. "Haste brings one set of hazards; delay, another.

I sorrow for your suffering, and I am sorry for my early arrogance, that assumed no one else had also suffered

When the last had passed, they

Right now, let's get back to the other connections between what happened and the things you quit doing, quit enjoying.

I do not want to work. I want to think about what it is they want to do to my brain and think about what it means. It means more than they say; everything they say means more than it says. Beyond the words is the tone; beyond the tone is the context; beyond the context is the unexplored territory of normal socialization, vast and dark as night, lit by the few pinpricks of similar experience, like stars.

ed. now. picking at the scab that was starting to heal over. why did guys do that? too little too late?