Quotes About Reflection

Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our undramatic life.

within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. —

In high school, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a bunch of us spent a whole year reading Cicero—De Senectute, on old age; De Amicitia, on friendship. De Senectute, with all its resigned wisdom, I will probably never be capable of living up to or imitating. But De Amicitia I could make a stab at, and could have any time in the last thirty-four years.

Even while you paid attention to what you must do today and tomorrow, you heard the receding sound of what you had relinquished.

As the country at large grows more stressful as a dwelling place, the quiet, remoteness, and solitude of a week on a wild river become more and more precious to more and more people.

He cited me her own remark that she wrote from the protected point of view, the woman's point of view, as evidence that she went through her life from inexperience to inexperience.

maybe we were the diggers of literature

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

This is not a journal", he wrote, "it is not notes for a novel, not a line-a-day record of the trivia my mind dredges up. Call it an attempt to understand." (Bruce) -Wallace Stegner (The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Pg. 436)

I must accept the justice of death and the injustice of more "life"; I had no right to remain a single hour.

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

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

We keep coming back and coming backTo the real: to the hotel instead of the hymnsThat fall upon it out of the wind.

It was the last nostalgia: that heShould understand.

Just as my fingers on these keysMake music, so the self-same soundsOn my spirit make a music, too.

These external regions, what do we fill them withExcept reflections, the escapades of death,Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things.... It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause...

Poetry is the subject of the poem.

To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.