Quotes About Reflection

I was way past the age when it's fun to swear at people you can't hurt.

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that... On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.

To say good-bye is to die a little.

smoke if you had anything to smoke, and think if you had anything to think about that didn't make you feel worse than not thinking at all.

She didn't even look towards me as I went out. I went out into the crisp fall sunlight and got into my car. I was a nice boy, trying to get along. Yes, I was a swell guy. I liked knowing myself. I was the kind of guy who chiseled a sodden old wreck out of her life secrets to win a ten-dollar bet.

There was a woman. She was rich. She thought she wanted to marry me. It wouldn't have worked. I'll probably never see her again. But I remember." "Let's go," she said quietly. "And let's leave the memory in charge. I only wish I had one worth remembering." On the way down to the Cadillac I didn't touch her either. She drove beautifully. When a woman is a really good driver she is just about perfect.

I went over to a floor lamp and pulled the switch, went back to put off the ceiling light, and went across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn't solve it, like a lot of my problems.

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 colours, 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.

poisoned myself with cigarette smoke

I looked at my watch, put my pipe in an ashtray, and then had to look at my watch again to see what time it was

One day, everything will be like before again. And it is not like it.

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. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.

bottle of rye out

You know what it is to laugh at death, Arutha. You'll never be the same man again.

You will have to make decisions far worse. You are going to have to learn to think before you act, but never to regret your decisions, right or wrong. Otherwise, you will slowly begin to not make decisions at all.

Find where the sound ends and silence begins. Then exist in that moment, for there will you find your secret centre of being, the perfect place of peace within yourself.

Now go. An actor should know when to leave the stage, a poet when the lay is finished, and a bard when it is time to put aside the lute.

All the way home, his wound pulsing with every hearbeat, he had cursed himself for a fool. How could he think she loved him? He had never been loved in his life, save perhaps by Erik and the other men who had served with him across the sea, and that was the love of comrades. He had never known the love of women, just their embrace. Twice he had found tears running down his face...

It takes a man of unusual character to openly confront his own shortcomings. It's so much more convenient to blame others.

it is almost impossible in the heat of the moment to understand long-term consequences.

there was no answer he knew, until he actually faced death.

When you lose everything,' Nathan had said, 'you've nothing left to lose. You've got two choices then: either kill yourself or start building a new life. When I started this new life, without my family, I decided the only sensible thing in it was to live for the small rewards: a job well done, a beautiful sunrise, the sound of children laughing at play, a good cup of wine. Makes it easy to deal with the harsher side of life.

Well, he thought, dwelling on past failures once you'd learned all there was to learn was just heaping futility on failure.

Life has shown me all too often it's a fragile gift. Remember, no one gets out of life alive.