Quotes About Reflection

Any well-written memoir is worth perusing with an eye to its structure.

Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest.

The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers.

Self-revelation without analysis or understanding becomes merely an embarrassment to both reader and writer.

To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways.

I don't leave home without me.

My mother warned me about me.

Poetry is not business as usual.

Judith Fitzgerald

Often she felt as though she had been picked up and turned about like a kaleidoscope, that all her complacent assumptions had been shaken up and reassembled in a different order

Childhood romances always seem so real, so enduring, when we are separated from the object of our affection. But usually, when we return, we find that our dreams and memories quiet surpassed reality. -Lady Anne, Whitney's aunt

How foolish to yearn to ask the very person who'd caused the pain to heal it

Christmas came three days ago.

It's Christ­mas, he whis­pered. His wife smiled up at him, and her an­swer made his throat tighten. No, she said softly, lay­ing her fin­gers against his jaw. Christ­mas came three days ago.

In fact, the only rash, ill-advised thing of any import he'd done in recent years was his behavior the weekend he'd met Elizabeth Cameron.

heart she faced the wrenching truth: Impulsiveness and recklessness, her two greatest faults, had brought her to this dire end—the same two character flaws that had

Everything wrong I've ever done has always seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Alexander Pope said that amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think.

I have always known that you will visit my grave. I see myself as a small brown bird, perhaps a sparrow, watching you from a low branch as you pray in front of my name. I will hear you sound out my epitaph: Aqui descansa una mujer que quiso volar. You will recall telling me that you once dreamed in Spanish, and felt the words lift you into flight. The sound of wings will startle you when you say volar, and you will understand.

The decade is over, time to begin forgiving old sins. Thirteen years since your death on a Florida interstate - and again a dream of an old wrong.

In the wind that may travel as far as you have gone, I send this message: Out here, in a place you will not forget, a simple man has been moved to curse the rising sun and to question God's unfinished work.

She was mourning all her life - not for her husband, who had released her with his death, but for her own dead heart.

what's really unique about maternal anxiety today is our belief that if something goes wrong with or for our children, it's a reflection on us as mothers. Because we believe we should be able to control life so perfectly that we can keep bad things from happening.

Something is missing, and it's something not so easy to name as semiabsent husbands, not so easy to point to as a lack of work, or too much work, or a lack of adequate child care. It's the sense that life should have led up to more than it has. A sense that after all the hard work, for all our achievements as individuals and as a postfeminist generation, life should be better than this.