Quotes About Reflection

He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the ground. This, he thought, was the moment when the dead must first feel truly alone. This was the moment when the dead, in loneliness, feel the first stirrings of the long penance of decay. This was the moment when the dead realize the truth: This is it, it will never be different. To be dead, he thought, that was to know that nothing would ever be different.

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…the Friend of Your Youth is your friend because he does not see you anymore.

I'd be (...) lying there on my back with my clothes on and looking up at the ceiling and watching the cigarette smoke flow up slow and splash against the ceiling like the upside-down slow-motion moving picture of the ghost of a waterfall or like the pale uncertain spirit rising up out of your mouth on the last exhalation, the way the Egyptians figured it, to leave the horizontal tenement of clay in its ill-fitting pants and vest.

To wake in some dawn and see / As though down a rifle barrel, lined up / Like sights, the self that was, the self that is, and there / Far off but in range, completing that alignment, your fate.

I have known time and distance, but not why I am here.

But why should I lie here longer? I am not dead yet … And the world's way is yet long to go, And I love the world even in my anger, And love is a hard thing to outgrow. —Robert Penn Warren, from "American Portrait: Old Style," Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978<.i> (Random House, 1978)

There is nothing like a good book to put you to sleep with the illusion that life is rich and meaningful.

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 non-existent 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 had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore

So I tried to make what amends I could for being what I was...

If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of. I had got hold of the

I studied her face, and for the moment just did that and let all the questions just slide away, like something dropped into the mist and water below us to slide away in the oily silence of the current. — Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1946)

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 how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.

It is human defect—to try to know oneself by the self of another. One can only know oneself in God and in His great eye.)

They say the drowning man relives his life as he drowns. Well, I was not drowning in water, but I was drowning in West. I drowned westward through the hot brass days and black velvet nights. It took me seventy-eight hours to drown. For my body to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless ooze of History, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California.

A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backwood and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.

We never know what we have lost, or what we have found. We are only ourselves, and that promise. Continue to walk in the world. Yes, love it!

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 felt is taken away from you, too. You bloody fool, do you think that you want to milk a cow? You do not want to milk a cow.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

But the first one had not been successful. It had not been successful because in the midst of the process I tried to discover the truth and not the facts.

A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backwood and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.

The grandfather's clock in the corner of the room, I suddenly realized, wasn't getting any younger. It would drop out a tick, and the tick would land inside my head like a rock dropped in a well, and the ripples would circle out and stop, and the tick would sink down the dark. For a piece of time which was not long or short, and might not even be time, there wouldn't be anything. Then the tock would drop down the well, and the ripples would circle out and finish.

The wind would come down a thousand miles and pound on the house and the sash would rattle and inside him something would be big and coiling slow and clotting till he would hold his breath and the blood would beat in his head with a hollow sound as though his head were a cave as big as the dark outside. He wouldn't have any name for what was big inside him. Maybe there isn't any name.

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.