Quotes About Reflection

for one knows little of oneself unless one has someone else in whom one is reflected. And since what one knows is really nothing, might it not be that at times he wished Tonka dead so that this intolerable existence might be over and done with?

Unser Leben] ist unüberwindlich verworren nur dann, wen man an sich denkt; aber in dem Augenblick, wo man nicht an sich denkt, sondern sich fragt, wie man einem anderen helfen könne, ist es sehr einfach.

Ulrich] richtete sich auf den Trümmern seiner Kindheit nicht ohne Schwierigkeiten ein, doch auch mit ein wenig angenehmen Gefühls, das wie Nebel aus diesem Boden aufstieg.

Vielleicht ist es ein Fehler, daß wir uns nicht erst als Greise kennen gelernt haben« sagte sie zu sich selbst und hatte die schwermütige Vorstellung zweier Nebelbänke, die am Abend zur Erde sinken. »Sie sind nicht so schön wie der strahlende Mittag,« dachte sie »aber was kümmert es diese zwei formlosen Grauen, wie die Menschen sie empfinden! Ihre Stunde ist gekommen und sie ist so weich wie die glühendste Stunde!«

They should not be turned in upon ourselves but upwards and outwards.

Chaque vérité éternelle existe en double, en multiples exemplaires.

We don't have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.

Progress would be wonderful — if only it would stop.

I can speak these words and perhaps you can see these things clearly because you are using your imagination. But I cannot imagine these things because I lived them, and to remember them with the vividness I know they should have is impossible. They are lost to me.

I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard's The Writing Life—a book I love—and one of the students said, "It's so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart.

the man you watched die yesterday doesn't exist today; he fell to yesterday's bullets and you've got today's bullets to deal with. Nevertheless, sometimes it got me to brooding.

History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.

the train goes fast and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-light, unriffled glint of the water between the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you feel is taken away from you, too.

He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.

I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make a future.

The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, speaks a name which belongs to that now nonexistent face but which by some inane and doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger.

I went back to my own innocent little chores and sat in my office as the fall drew imperceptibly on and the earth leaned on its axis and shouldered the spot I occupied a little out of the direct, billowing, crystalline, consuming blaze of the enormous sun.

We live in time so little time And we learn all so painfully, That we may spare this hour's term To practice for eternity.

they always gave good reasons for the things they did, and then when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were.

Oh, Anne, why did you do it?     It was the one question I had never meant to ask.     For a moment she did not answer. Then, without raising her eyes, she said in a low voice, He wasn't like anybody else. Not anybody else I'd ever known. And I love him. I love him, I guess. I guess that is the reason.     I sat there and reckoned I had asked for that one.

Were we happy tonight because we were happy or because once, a long time back, we had been happy? Was our happiness tonight like the light of the moon, which does not come from the moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light from far away?