Quotes About Reflection

Aún el diablo puede llorar cuando mira alrededor del infierno y se da cuenta de que está ahí, solo.-Acheron

But when didn't a lifetime feel unfinished?

What can be quieter than standing alone in a crowd of strangers?

Regie Gibson said, "Our problem as Americans is we actually hate history. . . . What we love is nostalgia. We love to remember things exactly the way they didn't happen. History itself is often an indictment. And people? We hate to be indicted.

I'm writing this book because we're all going to die.

After four hundred and ninety-nine years of existence, Connor Buchanan arrived at an inescapable conclusion regarding himself. He was a coldhearted old bastard.

If I'm such a bloody hero, why am I alone?

In fact, with experience and maturity we learn to worry less about others' intent and more about the effect others' actions are having on us. No longer are we in the game of rooting out unhealthy motives. And here's the good news. When we reflect on alternative motives, not only do we soften our emotions, but equally important, we relax our absolute certainty long enough to allow for dialogue— the only reliable way of discovering others' genuine motives.

You can't simply highlight an inspiring paragraph in a book and walk away changed.

avoid creating bad feelings or wasting our time?" It's interesting to watch what happens when people are presented with and questions after being stuck with Fool's Choices. Their faces become reflective, their eyes open wider, and they begin to think. With surprising regularity, when people are asked: "Is it possible that there's a way to accomplish both?" they acknowledge that there very well may be.

When you've gone to silence and are trying way too hard to convince yourself that you've done the right thing, you might want to examine whether you are intentionally minimizing the cost of not speaking up and exaggerating the risks of doing so.

For a long time that had seemed to her to be the key to life: Life--real life--was just a solitude waiting to be transfigured. If Phillip was with her, the solitude she needed would be shattered, and along with it whatever wondrous thing might have come her way if she had been alone.

If I could, I would work my way backward, paring away the years. I would reel my life arouond the wheel of this longing like so much loose wire.

Was that what it meant to be alive—moving from a brightly lit corridor into a darkened room at every step?

Their faces are like sunlight on water, a thousand tumbling jacks of white and silver.

He feels the way he used to feel passing love notes to girls in elementary school. Do you like me? the notes always read. Check yes or no. But he is older now and his question is older, too, not Do you like me? but Shouldn't someone?

Not that he truly wished them dead--that wasn't quite it--but more and more often, when the man considered his lifelong friends, his colleagues, even his wife and sons, he felt that their image of him had become so mildewed by habit or complicated by misunderstanding that he took comfort in the idea of their mortality: the thought that soon, very soon, they would die and he would no longer have to be the person they had concluded he was.

Not long ago he had turned sixty, an age when people hunger for a moment, however small, that will justify the years they have spent and those that still remain to them.

Tell me what you see vanishing and I Will tell you who you are —W. S. Merwin, "For Now

The central thing that Winslow could remember from this tme was the feeling of satisfaction he had, all the ride down with Carole King for company. As far as he could take it. As far as he could go. Something at least would happen next and this part would be over. He could feel the same movement starting up inside him, the same gathering wave, and wondered where it would leave him this time. Nothing to do, though. Nothing to do but wait and see.

I think some people who lead special lives, have somehow made this weird jump that they're better because of it. When you see that, its ugly. Being humble is pretty sexy. Being humble is a pretty great quality. Living in humility is a good way to live.

If developing ties to this world and exercising love and compassion are not the very point of us -- I cannot presume to know -- then we are at least better occupied in this way, I feel, than with the riddles of other worlds, which only prove impossible for us to solve and unhealthy even to ponder.

I DON'T have EX's! I have Y's. Like 'Y the hell did I date you?!' -Kevin Hart

Your life today is the sum total of your choices. So if you're not happy with it, look back at your choices and start making different ones. Even if you are struck by lighting and injured, you made choices that led you to that spot at a particular time - and you get to choose how you feel about it afterward.