Quotes About Reflection

I saw, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state, which had never truly been revealed to me before.

that awful human type of sadness.

It was dark by now, and electric light rained down in crossing lance-shapes through the glass ceiling from the buildings outside while the black body of the river undulated just beyond the windows, with the human figures inside interposed in reflection on its churning surfaces.

The second place was one such bridge, and Tony's silence ran undisrupted beneath it like a river.

He offered a stool next to his, but I went and sat in the old ladder-back chair beside the empty fire instead, a piece of furniture I have held on to throughout my adult life and that for reasons I have forgotten I had chosen to put there, in the second place. Perhaps it had reminded me too much of the life before Tony

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

you survived your own death and there was nothing left to do but to talk about it, to strangers on a plane or whoever would listen

no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don't bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement

The closest most people come to it is in having a child. And nowhere are our mistakes and limitations more plainly written than there!

It was hard to listen while you were talking. I had found out more by listening than I had ever thought possible.

his whole life, as far as she could see, consisted of writerly sinecures and engagements, like a whole life of eating only desserts. She wasn't sure it was healthy.

What was striking was the sheer negative capability of their former intimacy:

we drifted around and around, with the sun on our faces and our bodies hanging like three white roots beneath the water. I can see us there still,' he said, 'for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward -- or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exist in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal -- or can be.

Er wisse nicht, das wolle er an dieser Stelle betonen, ob er jemals wieder ein Buch schreiben werde; sein Verhältnis zur Welt sei unzureichend dynamisch.

Later, at the train station before she leaves, my sister says to me: you have to learn to hide what you feel from the children. They will feel what they think you feel. That are only reflections of you. I don't believe that, I say. If they think you're happy, they'll be happy, my sister says. Their feelings are their own, I say.

Wintry Peacock". It is an autobiographical

She looks out of the window of her apartment at the women running in the park, always running, and she asks herself whether they are running towards something or away from it. If she looks long enough she sees that they are simply running around in circles.

I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.

he asks herself whether they are running towards something or away from it. If she looks long enough she sees that they are simply running around in circles.

For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives.

But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.

Some people write simply because they don't know how to live in the moment and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be.