Quotes About Reflection

The key is to appreciate what we've got right now and yet still dream and plan.

We trigger each other, it seems, some dysfunctional Rube Goldberg mousetrap, a laugh, then a slap, a razor gliding over a mirror, a glass filled, a glass emptied, a ball rolling down a length of pipe, a pipe filling up and overflowing with smoke. On our best days, we see each other for all that we are, and we find a way to make each other better.

Because every time she looked at me, she saw him, our son, that generous boy, and it was another gut punch bending her over, another parting of her flesh, and I was one of the thousand, and my gift to her now was my echo. (from "Twenty Reasons to Stay and One to Leave")

It's fun to sing sad songs. And it's fun to listen to sad songs. Enjoyable. Satisfying. Something.

I'm a woofer, not a tweeter; a writer, not a telegrapher; an essayist, not an aphorist.

Cagayan River.

All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. ... It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or undone.

Scents, dreams, thoughts — even words — they all try to stick around, but we ignore them, so they leave.

Intellectual empathy requires us to think within the viewpoints of others, especially those we think are wrong.

Everything we know, believe, want, fear, and hope for, our thinking tells us. It follows, then, that the quality of our thinking is the primary determinant of the quality of our lives.

She only nodded. "It's all we are in the end. Our stories.

I discovered that being someone you are not is often easier than living with the person you are.

The head has no answers, and the heart has no questions, Jack would say." Quoting his teacher and good friend Jack Kakakaway

Actions born of contemplation are wiser than those made in quiet desperation. If all that's true, and I feel it is, then I have grown some in these 61 years. I have learned and become a better person. And from that maybe it's the years ahead that will be the richest of my life. A quiet man moving forward, gladly beyond all expectation.

I learned that I could draw the boundaries of my physical self inward, collapse the space I occupied and become a mote, a speck, an indifferent atom in its own peculiar orbit.

All that we are is story...It is what we arrive with. It is all we leave behind.

There is enough for everyone on this earth. There always was. When you gaze up at the sky on a starry night, that's what we need to remember.

Late in the evenings I'd walk into the trees, stride through the bush until I was wrapped in it, cocooned. The stars that pinwheeled above spun a thousand light years away. Time, mystery, departure and union were there all at once. I wondered if this was what it meant to be Indian, Ojibway. A ritual. A ceremony, ancient and simple and personal. If I could have borne it with me into the day-to-day life of the camp, things might have been different.

I felt as though nothing had changed. I felt as though the only thing I had done was quit drinking. Only the land offered me any kind of solace.

I understood then how hard years are to get a hold of, how elusive the life in them can be to capture and retell. I understood then too that time does not heal all wounds. I wanted to say it all in one brilliantly executed sentence, encompass all of it in a succinct, effortless rush. But I couldn't. I was at a loss where to begin.

Then I walked out to my truck and was gone by the time I started the engine.

And me, well, I have to confess that I liked them all too, but maybe leaned more in favour of those types of stories that reached inside of you, touched something that you hadn't touched for a long time, and reminded you of the soft moments where you really came to be who you are. Spoken by Amelia One For The Road (a fictional character in Ragged Company) about the movies she'd seen.

Divorce is one of the most financially traumatic things you can go through. Money spent on getting mad or getting even is money wasted.

Richard Webster