Quotes About Reflection

Honestly, I didn't have the patience for biology or history in an academic sense, but I always liked the kind of big questions.

If you don't get enough time-outs as a child, you get them as a grownup.

Andrew Burstein

All honor's wounds are self-inflicted.

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. ~Germaine Greer

We have to assume that the people whose dwelling-places, artefacts, lives even, we are dealing with were rational, integrated, sane and sensible human beings. Then we look around at our own contemporaries and wonder how this belief can possibly be sustained.

We may feel like victims but wonder if we are possibly coconspirators. At the very least, we selected a partner with these faults. Might we have also permitted these faults or even fostered them?

Like I said before, I'm ten now, so I've had some time to figure out some stuff.

I am constantly telling my own story to myself, and these days that's about all the narrative flow I can handle.

Truth is, Dad, I don't blame Judge Parker," he said quietly. "I mouthed off pretty bad in court. He could've given me sixty days in jail, or even ninety. I've got no gripe with him. It was my own fault—all of it.

But if the messiness makes me feel like this, then it's worth it, right?

One of the most extraordinary things about being a spiritual teacher is the rare privilege of being able to look deeply into the very souls of many human beings at the same time.

she would often remind herself that her thoughts were free no matter how oppressive her life might sometimes feel.

If you cannot love the pain, you can at least love the lessons it teaches

I am not a hero in soul and never will be, but I am better than I was before. Or so I tell myself; and for now that is enough.

What is it like to wear another person's skin?" "I don't have a good answer for that," I said. "It hurts." "Can you remember their stories? Can you feel the love that they felt?

The problem with people like us is that we don't die properly.

The urge is always with me to retouch yesterday's canvas with today's paintbrush and cover the things that fill me with regret

I am not a hero in soul and never will be, but I am better than I was. Or so I tell myself; and for now, that is enough.

The cliché goes that at twenty a person has the face that God gave him, but at forty he has the face he has earned.

How could you escape a past that was so determined to make you pay?

Everyone's past, I try to rationalize, is nothing more than the collection of memories they choose to remember.

have spent much time there, in this grand empty space between memory and desire, creating this cracked empire of sentences in which I now live.

Do you know what the best part of that swim was?" "No." "Knowing that you were on the shore waiting for me.