Quotes About Reflection

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. "I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us.

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

You said you were a fairy princess You said you were a shooting star You said we'd go to Bora Bora Now look at where the fuck we are

If I could imagine the past with compassion, why couldn't I breathe hope into an imagined future?

Briefly, I was a journalist in my twenties, although not a very good one. I didn't quite grasp the whole concept of accuracy.

Each minute seemed like hours and hours. But then the years passed by like days.

But there were times when I remembered my younger self the way you'd remember a dear friend you'd lost, for reasons you no longer quite understood.

I learned the terrible truth that as we morph from self to self over time, the love that one self has sworn can seem unfathomable to another.

Since then, the awareness that I was in the wrong body, living the wrong life, was never out of my conscious mind—never, although my understanding of what it meant to be a boy, or a girl, was something that changed over time.

a memoir is meant to be an impression of life, and not a photograph.

You carry the past with you. Even if there's a before, and an after, in your life. It's still the same life. The trick is to build a bridge between that and what comes later.

Lincoln would remember this episode with amusement.20

My mom has always said that the one thing she wishes she had done differently is have a job. She felt like the single-mindedness made her a little nuts sometimes, and she could have used an outlet for herself when we were little.

Lizzie,' he said. It was only my name, but in it was all these different emotions at aonce. A prism in a word.

When had I stopped disparaging my parents' way of life and had instead begun to covet it?

It's true more often than we realize: each new love is built from the wreckage of the loves that came before. In Kath, Mike saw Lisa; in Art's eyes, she resembled our mother. I can't look at Mike's face without seeing Dad's. Art, to Ma, was the living ghost of Harry Breen. We love those who fit the peculiar voids within us, our hollow wounds. We love to fill the spaces the old loves left behind.

Driving east into the bright sun, he'd been dogged by a creeping sense of déjà vu, but it wasn't until Kath called to Aidan—Help Father with the cooler!—that he recognized the scene from his own childhood. How strange, how disorienting, to find himself in the man's seat, driving, when in his mind he was still the little boy.

He spent two weeks in South Shore Hospital in a state of near oblivion; and when he woke, it was as though he'd taken a trip around the world and lost most of his luggage along the way. Heavy bags they were, packed with thirty years of indignities, rages, brawls and indiscretions.

Show me a man of fifty who doesn't regret the lives he hasn't lived.

Half of sobriety was wishing you'd never started: if you'd never taken that first drink, first bump, you could have stayed clean forever with no sweat at all. Instead, it became your life's work.

That the woman was beautiful and dear to him, that he'd told her things he'd never told a living soul: this would have been more than enough even without the dreamlike echo of another moment, equally potent. For it seemed to him, the whole day long, that both reels were rolling at once, his boyhood and manhood, the indelible past and achingly tangible present. The boy he'd been and the man he was;

I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .

His words stayed with her for years. Each night as she lay waiting for sleep, she tried to re-create the evening in her mind — the tone of his voice, his hand on her shoulder. Soon the memory was worn as an old photograph, the edges fuzzy from frequent handling; she worried that she'd gotten the words wrong, forgotten some nuance of his face or voice. Finally she wondered if she'd made the whole thing up.

What can a photograph mean? It seems to me, now, that it's not so much the image itself as the fact that it was kept. In my own bedroom closet are three large boxes I labeled—late one night, in a dark mood—PLUTONIUM. They are filled with my own keepsakes and very heavy, decades of living distilled down to a few potent sentiments: tenderness, longing, regret.