Quotes About Reflection

You can't be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own.

The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth. Those I don't have, but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on.

What if I can't turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from.

I didn't know myself well, and still don't. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relations with them have more than once been abrasive.

The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors. Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions.

How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it's autobiography. Sure, it's fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it's true.

Ruth tells me at least once a day that old people, or people getting old, tend to disengage, back away, turn inward, listen only to themselves, and get self-righteous and censorious. And they mustn't. (I mustn't.)

The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.

Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life ... I wonder if you ever reached it.

He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe.

Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the organic residue of a man or a generation? This is all metaphor. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived.

Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.

Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like.

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood, Touch of manner, hint of mood . . ." How does it go?

You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound.

Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our totally undramatic life.

sitting in Grandmother's old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life.

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention, and

but she's as blunt as a splitting maul." She thinks about that, walking again.

Whatever we thought about art and its relation to life, we knew that the Faulkner motto we had adopted in harder times no longer served. "They kilt us but they ain't whupped us yit" was no watchword for this world so full of interest, instruction, suggestiveness, possibility,

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you. 8 Here is one thing that eventually struck me: March 19, 1938, a Saturday.

Closing up the canyon camp was like closing up a house after a death. ("It is easier to die than to move," she wrote Augusta once; "at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.")