Quotes About Reflection

real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.

I looked in my mirror and saw, not myself, but every place I'd never been.

Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.

In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit....

I was beautiful, or so my father told me. My oval mirror showed me a face with nothing written on it. I had suitors aplenty but wanted none of them: their doggish devotion seemed too easily won. I had an appetite for magic, even then. I wanted something improbably and perfect as a red rose just opening.

I may have had moments of regret in my life, but you know, they wouldn't add up to an hour.

It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere...

I have tried to use memory and invention together, like two hands engaged in the same muddy work of digging up the past.

Because your soul must be lonely. That silence you heard, when you tried to pray—that's the sound of God listening.

At any rate, let's not waste time on ruminations and regrets in the middle of a pandemic.

Careful." Why do persons only say that after the hurt? Grandma

Not beautiful, not brilliant, no longer young.

In the days when wishing was having, I got what I wished and then I wish I hadn't.

One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country. It struck Lib now how alone in the world she was.

He supposed it was always that way with the dead, they slid away before we knew enough to ask them the right questions.

Really, thought Lib, who ever died exultingly? Whatever fool penned that phrase had never sat by a bed with his ears pricked for the last rasp.) Aged

And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.

Please, he added. I meant to say, please. I've thought it all through. I've thought of nothing else. I haven't read a book in weeks!

But if there's no heaven what remains?

Driving home I see the playground but it's all wrong, the swings are on the opposite side. Oh, Jack, that's a different one, says Grandma. There's playgrounds in every town. Lots of the world seems to be a repeat.

it was always that way with the dead; they slid away before we knew enough to ask them the right questions. All we could do was remember them, as much as we could remember them, whether it was accurate or not.

So they're fake? No, no. Stories are a different kind of true. I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.

You, she thought. Every flawed, scrawny

But what on earth had possessed her, to take a wagon this far beyond nowhere? When