Quotes About Reflection

Common sense is the guy who tells you that you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always someone else's money he's adding up.

She was thinking. i could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.

Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don't they? It takes about three years. Three years? He looked shocked. Usually it does. It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won't even like most of them, and they won't like you too well.

I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.

He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway.

Leave us do the thinking sweetheart. It takes equipment.

I lit one of Mr. Talbot's cigarettes and hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, wherever they were, were having a much better time than I was. I hoped I would live long enough to come and visit them.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page...

I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot dangling.

Permanecí sentado, muy quieto, escuchando cómo iba aquietándose la tarde por las ventanas abiertas. Y, muy lentamente, fui aquietándome con ella.

There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.

I went down to the lobby and slipped the catch and then took a shower and put my pajamas on and lay down on the bed. I could have slept for a week. I dragged myself up off the bed again and set the catch on the door, which I had forgotten to do, and walked through a deep hard snowdrift out to the kitchenette and laid out glasses and a bottle of liqueur Scotch I had been saving for a really high-class seduction.

I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling.

Ich blickte den Revolver an, und der Revolver blickte mich an.

She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

I didn't say anything. I lit my pipe again. It makes you look thoughtful when you're not thinking.

This was the time to leave, to go far away. So I pushed the door open and stepped quietly in.

Wherever I went, whatever I did, this was what I would come back to. A blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house.

Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.

Uh-huh. Could be,' I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn't have a damn thing more to say.

I went back to my car again and sat and sat. The top dripped on my knees and my stomach burned from the whiskey. No more cars came up the hill. No lights went on in the house before which I was parked. It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with it.