Quotes About Reflection

She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she felt herself summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when 'Anne's life' just about covered it.

It [beauty] had always felt like something I might find, or something I had temporarily lost, or something I was pursuing.

Il destino, ha detto, non è che verità allo stato naturale.

And it was the same with my first wife and me,' he said. 'We hit a bump in the road, and over we went.' It had, he now realised, been a happy relationship, the most harmonious of his life. He and his wife had met and got engaged as teenagers; they had never argued, until the argument in which everything between them was broken.

It was nearly thirty years since his first marriage ended, and the further he got from that life, the more real it became to him. Or not real exactly, he said – what had happened since had been real enough. The word he was looking for was authentic: his first marriage had been authentic in a way that nothing ever had again. The older he got, the more it represented to him a kind of home, a place to which he yearned to return.

I said it was true that the question of whether to leave or remain was one we usually asked ourselves in private, to the extent that it could almost be said to constitute the innermost core of self-determination.

Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.

Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.

while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

he was observing something while I, evidently, was entirely immersed in being it.

and his wonder at the marks experience has left on her woman's body.

asked him what it was he was writing, and his smile widened. He said, I am writing about my childhood. I was so happy as a child, he continued, and I realised a little while ago that there was nothing I wanted so much as to recall it piece by piece, with every possible detail.

What is the point of self pity if there is was nobody to pity you for it?

what is the point of self pity if there was nobody to pity you for it?

while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

What is history other than memory without pain?' he said, smiling pleasantly and folding his small white hands together on the table in front of him. 'If people want to recapture some of those hardships, these days they go to the gym.

The problem was, the more complex he allowed his vision of life to become, the further he removed himself from his own capacity to act.

it seems to me as though my wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion.

we examine least what has formed us the most, and instead find ourselves driven blindly to re-enact it. Maybe it's only in our injuries, he said, that the future can take root.

I said a lot of people spent their lives trying to make things last as a way of avoiding asking themselves whether those things were what they really wanted.

É como passar em frente a uma casa onde se morou: o fato de ela ainda existir, tão concreta, faz tudo o que aconteceu desde então parecer de algum modo imaterial.

O que Ryan havia aprendido com isso era que os seus fracassos vivem voltando para você, enquanto os seus sucessos são algo de que você precisa sempre se convencer.

he felt the destruction had by now been earned in full by humanity...

find it difficult to answer my own needs. The sight of other people getting what they want, jostling and demanding things, makes me decide I would rather go without.