Quotes About Reflection

Yes. She rebelled, I suppose, against being made to live in the past. After all, there's a time for everything. You can't sit in the house with the blinds down forever.

Long walks are off, and alas, bathing in the sea; fillet steaks and apples and raw blackberries (teeth difficulties) and reading fine print. But there is a great deal left. Operas and concerts, and reading, and the enormous pleasure of dropping into bed and going to sleep, and dreams of every variety. Almost best of all, sitting in the sun--gently drowsing and there you are again--remembering. I remember, I remember, the house where I was born....

I don't want to write about it at all. I want, you see, to think about it as little as possible. Hercule Poirot was dead - and with him died a good part of Arthur Hastings.

Time, thought Bobby suddenly, was a very frightening thing.

The longer the time that has elapsed, the more things fall into proportion. One sees them in their true relationship to one another.

Life is more worth living, more full of interest when you are likely to lose it. It shouldn't be, perhaps, but it is. When you're young and strong and healthy, and life stretches ahead of you, living isn't really important at all. It's young people who commit suicide easily, out of despair from love, sometimes from sheer anxiety and worry. But old people know how valuable life is and how interesting. - Jane Marple

Well, of course, it was not any of my business but you get very queer glimpses of life sometimes, and you can't help speculating about them.

If you hadn't anything worth saying why go chattering all the time?

I feel that if I could sweep all this away . . . all the buildings and the sects and the fierce squabbling churches . . . that I might see Christ's quiet figure riding into Jerusalem on a donkey--and believe in him.

With a shock Iris realized suddenly that it was the first time in her life she had ever thought about Rosemary. Thought about her, that is, objectively, as a person. She had always accepted Rosemary without thinking about her. You didn't think about your mother or your father or your sister or your aunt. They just existed, unquestioned, in those relationships. You didn't think about them as people. You didn't ask yourself, even, what they were like.

That rebellion of mine was an important turning point in my life.

Do you remember the Lady of Shalott? The mirror crack'd from side to side: 'The doom has come upon me,' cried the Lady of Shalott. Well, that's what she looked like. People laugh at Tennyson nowadays, but the Lady of Shalott always thrilled me when I was young and it still does.

But after a while they stopped talking about her and discussed instead who was going to win the Grand National. For, as Mr Ferguson was saying at that minute in Luxor, it is not the past that matters but the future.

If you look into somebody's soul by accident, you feel a bit embarrassed about cashing in.

One takes things for granted too much," said Emily Brent.

Men, they never think.

E: When one has at last reached freedom, can one even contemplate going back? HC: But if it is not possible to go back, or to choose to go back, then it is not freedom! ~Ericsson; Hilary Craven

I don't particularly want to think of your funeral because I'd much prefer to die before you do. But I mean, if I were going to your funeral, at any rate it would be an orgy of grief. I should take a lot of handkerchiefs.

What are the years from twenty to forty? Fettered and bound by personal and emotional relationships. That's bound to be. That's living. But later there's a new stage. You can think, observe life, discover something about other people and the truth about yourself. Life becomes real--significant. You see it as a whole. Not just one scene--the scene you, as an actor, are playing. No man or woman is actually himself (or herself) till after forty-five. That's when individuality has a chance.

Somehow, the more I get older, and the more I see of people and sadness and illness and everything, the sorrier I get for everyone.

She couldn't let the past go and she could never see the future as it really was, only as she imagined it to be.

I felt a distinct pleasure in passing on my own discomfiture.

He had had a lonely life and a lonely death. But it had been the kind of loneliness that spends itself in living amongst people, and in passing the time that way not unpleasantly. Major Palgrave might have been a lonely man, he had also been quite a cheerful one.

They all fuss about me so," she said. "They rub it in that I'm an old woman." "And you don't feel like one." "No, I don't, Jane. In spite of all my aches and pains–and I've got plenty. Inside I go on feeling just like a chit like Gina. Perhaps everyone does. The glass shows them how old they are and they just don't believe it.