Quotes About Reflection

First, a man is created in his own image, and only afterwards in the image of God.

When a man makes a reverent face before a face that is no face — that is idol worship.

No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been. No nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed.

I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books.

I slipped into art to escape life. I sneaked off into literature.

To write is to know that you are not at home.

She felt the intimate loss of who she was meant to become.

Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass—an hourglass that drains grain by grain.

Most of the books published these days consist of a series of whines followed by an epiphany.

I was always alone, Doc, solitary whether I wished to be or not, ever since I could remember I wished to be lost in another, thought that somehow I could disappear into that heart of yours, take walks within your veins, wander through the bones of you. You had friends, Satan said, you loved and were loved, you must not forget that, at least not that. But did I allow anyone in, I asked Satan, and he said, Did you, does anyone?

Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.

The cure for loneliness is solitude. —Marianne Moore, from the essay "If I Were Sixteen Today

I prefer slow conversations where words are counted like pearls, conversation with many pauses, pauses replacing words. An Unnecessary Woman

We, like most humans, consider history a lesson on a blackboard that can be sponged off.

I thought I'd be reading a new book today, but it doesn't feel right, or I don't feel like it. Some days are not new-book days. After

The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

I'd dismembered it in my memories. I'd disremembered it.

You've been gone for decades, you hid deep in my lakes, why now, why infect my dreams now? What flood is this?

She felt the intimate loss of who was meant to become.

I told her I was not sure I could bear living with memories, she said, Look up at the stars, look, they are not there, what you see is the memory of what once was, once upon a time.

My features have blunted with the passage of time, my reflection only faintly resembles how I see myself. Gravity demands payback for the years my body has resisted it.

I thought I'd be reading a new book today, but it doesn't feel right, or I don't feel like it. Some days are not new-book days.