Quotes About Reflection

I know." She sighed. "We'll all say that. We'll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.

All the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads.

Bad things don't just grow on one path, they're everywhere. So don't blame yourself when those things happen. Don't let yesterday take up much of today.

It seemed to him that nothing would ever be explained, and that all of a sudden each day was slipping away, that time was flying by and they were getting old and nothing would ever come clear.

what has mattered are the moments of exposure to every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes a great man, for a moment; and the choices made in those moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history.

A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe. —Le

as if you are already dead.'" "What's that?" "A Japanese saying. Live as if you are already dead.

The past is always gone," Wahram said. "Whether the place is still there or not.

Oh God, Coyote said, and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one hand. It's hard to remember something that long ago. It's almost like an epic poem I memorized once, and can barely recite anymore.

Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you.

To ask what it all means, what it's all for. To consider the axioms we are agreeing to live by. To acknowledge the reality of other people, and of the planet itself. To see other people's faces. To walk outdoors and look around.

This is your life, Frank. What would you do without it?

it would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the century's war dead. . . . he saw himself walking the Mall in Washington, D.C., and the whole park from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial was dotted with the black Vs of Vietnam Memorials, as if a flock of giant stealth birds had landed on it. All night he walked past black wing walls, moving west toward the white tomb on the river.

The beautiful statue of Ganymede and the eagle looked like they had been molded out of white ceramic, and in Ganymede's outstretched arms it seemed to me a whole world was being embraced, a rushing world of gray sky and gray water where everything passed by so fast that you cnever got the chance to hold it, to touch it, to make it yours. Can't we keep anything?

a streetlight reflected off the black cobblestones . . . in such a way that there were thousands of brief white squiggles underfoot, looking like names engraved on black granite, as if the whole surface of the earth were paved by a single memorial.

texts are written for people to read later.

Everything dies someday. Better to die thinking that you're going to miss a golden age, than to go out thinking that you had taken down your children's chances with you. That you'd left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that would be depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves.

Something strange happened to me out there in the desert; I don't know what.

Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream.

Memory is a haunting. You remember times you liked, and you want something like them. But you can only get new things. So I try to want what I get. It isn't obvious how to do it.

Sometimes," she said, wiping her eyes, "sometimes I wish I could stop being Toitovna. I get so tired of it, of everything that I've done." Michel sat beside her. "We're locked in our selves to the end. This is the price one pays for thought. But which would you rather be—convict, or idiot?

Some mistakes you never can make good.

It's not as if she needs the torch anymore, the welcome beacon to immigrants having been long since snuffed out. Probably

Wherever you go, there we are. It wasn't true. But it made him feel better. That was what words could do.