Quotes About Reflection

I always carry the book of Holy Writ...and something to read...

which he needs time and privacy. What better way of keeping us in Cairo

marred by deep lines of

right after the evening meal, as I am

I want to clean myself like the window of a house, make myself clear for things to pass through. Flat and quiet.

He read it over twenty times and though the darkness that sang on held steady about him, the unhurried words fell bright through his mind, going down golden through deep water, and when one passed another came, ceaselessly, shining.

Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.

But the books brought me things. This is my point. They made me feel less alone.

But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.

I think our job--maybe even our 'duty'--is to--To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.

It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.

It is very strange that the years teach us patience - that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.

It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times.

There's no summing-up, but a sense of incompleteness. After years of building up each unique personality, in the end there is no moment of putting lines beneath the sum and adding up to see what it all amounts too.

If you hate it, if you find you have made a mistake, it will still have been a change. As with a holiday, if it ends in your wishing to come home, its aim is accomplished.

All that she saw and felt tired her, and she longed to shut out the world and be secure in the womb of her imagination.

She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump.

Nor would I willingly miss the early darkness and the pleasant firelight tea and the long evenings among my books.

so I took it out with me into the garden, because the dullest book takes on a certain saving grace if read out of doors, just as bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eaten under a tree.

There is nothing so absolutely bracing for the soul as the frequent turning of one's back on duties.

all forms of needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for keeping the foolish from applying their hearts to wisdom.

Once more she had that really rather disgusting suspicion that her life till now had not only been loud but empty.

Well, she had had the most wonderful summer; she had got that anyhow tucked away up the sleeve of her memory, and could bring it out and look at it when the days were wet and she felt cold and sick.