Quotes About Reflection

We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.

Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic

I want it said of me by those who know me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

That solitude promotes insight as well as change," Storr continues, "has been recognized by the great religious leaders"—including the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed—"who have usually retreated from the world before returning to it to share what has been revealed to them.

In a modern dictionary, the noun "melancholy" has two definitions. First, it means "thoughtful or gentle sadness.

Why do we have two ears and one mouth? In order to talk half as much as we listen.

I do remember what I said. The promise. To protect her. If I'd done that ... even if I didn't make it, you wouldn't've had to jump. I want you to know I did save you. Not when it counted, of course. But after that. Every night after that. I'd see it all again, do something different. Faster or more clever, you know? Dozens of times, lots of different ways ...Every night I save you.

I mean, I knew I wasn't a nice person, but what did I do in my past life to deserve this? I must have hit a bus full of nuns while driving a stolen car on my way to selling drugs to schoolchildren!

Everything we do really is just a little marker on the long road to death. And sometimes that's overwhelmingly depressing to me, and sometimes it makes me feel kinship and forgiveness. We've all got the same ending to the story. The way we make that story more elaborate, I got to respect.

Try taking a stand on just one leg. You need to see both sides.

Sketchy: I'm no stranger to stoner logic.

Don't go bigger, go deeper.

In a way, we [poets] are listeners. I go to poetry because I don't have the words." —

I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind. If I think behind me, I might break. If I think forward, I lose now.

History will always find you, and wrap you In its thousand arms.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time. Do not hold regrets.

The Poem I Just Wrote The poem I just wrote is not real. And neither is the black horse who is grazing on my belly. And neither are the ghosts of old lovers who smile at me from the jukebox.

began to follow all of my thoughts and was surprised how many didn't belong to me. And how many had threads to ancestors, relatives, strangers, even plants, elements, and animals.

She thinks of the 4 a.m. lonelinesses that have folded her up like death, discordant, without logical and beautiful conclusion.

I remain very aware of my failures and often run them obsessively through my mind, which is a failure in and of itself.

You're gone now, and I'm still in this predicament called living, Charlie. I imagine things don't change much when you cross the line. You're still you. And I'm still here at the other end of this long, long wave, listening.

The question that comes up when you write about trauma is, are you retraumatizing? Are you retraumatizing by writing about trauma? That's a good question. I remember the writer, poet Meridel Le Sueur, social activist in the '30, calling to tell me when I was a young woman, she said: "I wrote so beautifully about terrible things that happened. And was I wrong to do that?

I study and read poems and try to put myself in them.

Or maybe you are my own life scheming desperately to climb back in.