Quotes About Reflection

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue-all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.

I'd been so fascinated by the notion, that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming.

Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time.

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. That must be it, I thought—to lose your direction is to lose your face.

I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in a circus sideshow, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination- indeed, everything and anything except me.

Times are grave and you seem very indignant.

Boy on a Train From

During these times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back to the dead to give them a clue, they call first upon one and then upon another of those who have acted in the past.

Don't come early in the morning Neither in the heat of the day But come in the sweet cool of the Evening and wash my sins away

What did I do To be so black And blue?

Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation.

I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple. But not anymore.

I shivered in the hot street.

That which we do is what we are. That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tall tale told by inattentive idealists.

Perhaps, like them, I was a throwback, a small distant meteorite that died several hundred years ago and now lived only by virtue of the light that speeds through space at too great a pace to realize that its source has become a piece of lead

Time was as I was, but neither that time nor that I are any more.)

if you don't, you're already dead anyway. Now hush, because you're simply thinking words, old saws. So hush…all is noise.

I've illuminated the blackness of my invisibility—and vice versa.

And I knew in spite of the anguish within me that the sun goeth down.

Have I become one of those bores who talk too much about their children?

There's nothing like isolating a man to make him think.

Don't laugh at fools. Some are His.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste, what a senseless waste!