Quotes About Reflection

Oh, it's a terrible, cruel thing—first you're young, and that takes up such a long time you think it's forever, then suddenly you're not young, and you never get used to it—and, oh dear, there's just the one way out." ? Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys

yearning self? Yearning to purify himself at last, after

The writer understands how deeply mysterious the 'familiar' really is. How strangely opaque, what we've seen a thousand times. And how inconsolable a loss, when the taken-for-granted is finally taken from us.

you've glanced at me, and through me, dear Dr. K——, upon more than one recent occasion, no more recognizing your Angel than you would have recognized a plate heaped with food you'd devoured twenty-three years ago with a zestful appetite

Alone, alone! Long she would recall the strangeness of the word, an echo aerated by melancholy vowels—alone. AT

A dog's life is a speeded-up version of your own. After a while, you can hardly bear to be a witness.

He said oh honey. how long have you known? Meaning, how long have you been alone, knowing?

Our lives are Möbius strips, misery and wonder simultaneously. Our destinies are infinite, and infinitely recurring. In

It was Corinne's secret belief that her daughter was a far finer person than she was herself, a riddle put to her by God. I must become the mother deserving of such a daughter—is that it?

Es corriente entre las víctimas de violación, sea hombre o mujer, evitar los espejos y la confrontación directa con todas las imágenes de "sí mismas". Como si donde había habido una persona, ahora no hubiera nadie.»

It was a time of sin. It was not a time of innocence. It was a time of physical disgust. For I remember well.

the mirror above the bureau—a flushed blurred face. I had learned to look quickly away from that face for so often I hated what I saw.

and much more interesting.

My mind rattled on fast as a machine sometimes, ran its own way without my participation. So I'd know the answer to the algebra problem but not the steps to that answer. Or what a poem like Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken meant but not ho to explain it.

A mí me resultaba fascinante oír a mi hermano mayor hablando a nuestro padre como un niño, como yo, que tenía diez años. Se me ocurrió una cosa: «¿Nunca nos hacemos mayores?». Por alguna extraña razón, eso me consolaba.

La memoria a veces resulta confusa, esa es la cuestión. Si la memoria no fuera confusa no poseerías el valor del necio de repetir una y otra vez cosas que te destrozan.

That is a blessing of bad dreams, they are quickly forgotten.

Solace came only with darkness. When dusk yielded to the sweet oblivion of night.

The striking thing about self-knowledge is that it may be lacking.

she had to think about—whatever it was, she had to think about—something urgent and essential in her own life that was a million pixels swirling in a thunder-cloud about to burst.

Thank god for beauty, a balm to the soul.

And he'd died because that life had mattered to him.

She didn't return to school until the first Monday in March. By that time she'd thought, thought long and hard, much of the time in solitude in her room, and healed herself. Of course, she kept up with her school assignments; she was diligent, even obsessive about that.

You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.