Quotes About Reflection

I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen's eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid.

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.

When my mama was twenty-five she already had an old woman's hands, and I feared them. I did not know then what it was that scared me so. I've come to understand since that it was the thought of her growing old, of her dying and leaving me alone. I feared those brown spots, those wrinkles and cracks that lined her wrists, ankles, and the soft shadowed sides of her eyes.

I could not stand it, neither the words on the page nor what they told me about myself. My neck and teeth began to ache, and I was not at all sure I really wanted to live with that stuff inside me. But holding onto them, reading them over again, became a part of the process of survival, of deciding once more to live--and clinging to that decision.

I made my life, the same way it looks like you're gonna make yours—out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you're mad at. You better think hard.

Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones

Look around you. Apartheid is being dismantled and Nelson Mandela walks the streets of South Africa. Until a few years ago, I could not imagine that happening. Russia is a new place, so is China. The communist bogeyman I was threatened with throughout my childhood is gone. The world is no less dangerous, and people are still dying for their origins, beliefs, color, and sexuality, but I find myself full of startled awe and hope. The rigid world into which I was born has been shaken profoundly.

Take them as letters from a battleground more mythic than remembered, and use them to figure out who you are and what you might become.

I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it.

It was death Aunt Ruth was thinking about all the time. Death was the reason she had talked so much, so intently, death was the fire burning her up. With every breath and laugh and wiped-away tear, she had been dying.

I found in myself the heroine of every heartbreak song I had ever laughed at but played again.

He didn't consciously bring Brub to memory. It was one of those minnows of thought, darting through the unruffled pond of his thinking.

It doesn't do my self-esteem much good though, does it?' 'Your self-esteem has had a lifetime of steady attention,' said Philippa abstractedly.

There was a silence. 'You didn't as,' said Jerott at length. 'But I would have forgone even the body for the sake of the mind. And I would have claimed neither body nor mind, had I discovered a soul.

Don't you think you should retire again? The first retiral seems to have got mislaid.

Self-knowledge is not sold on the Rialto. And if it were, few people would buy.

Lymond said gently, Let us bathe in moral philosophy, as in a living river. Double-dealing is my business.

Well. On which aspect of our ill-advised doings are we about to lecture each other? I have very little to say. As I recall, I exhausted the matter on several other occasions.

There is no one to understand us, except ourselves.

Mr Blyth, you should remember one thing. A celibate island life fighting Turks is no particular guarantee of early maturity. Take a little crone-like advice, and don't rush your judgements.

A man of over thirty might be held to be at the height of his powers, but not necessarily of his wisdom.

I echo like a mynah, that's why.

Some day, I must take my own prolific advice and contrive to drop dead.