Quotes About Reflection

Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.

A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant.

A Book Is a Heart That Only Beats in the Chest of Another. ~Rebecca Solnit on the Solitary Intimacy of Reading and Writing

When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time.

When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, and the forces that shaped me, Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters: it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live.

It wasn't surprising and it wasn't quite real. I kept thinking it was a bizarre mistake or a made-up story, until I called her mother, who told me how beautifully made up Marine's corpse was and urged me to see her at the funeral chapel. This with her cigarettes still in my ashtray, her hair still in my brush, her clothes still in my car, her voice still in my ears, so soon after we'd been looking at ourselves together in my mirror and she the more lithe, the more fluidly beautiful of the two

One of my goals in life is to become truly rabbinical, to be able to answer closed questions with open questions, to have the internal authority to be a good gatekeeper when intruders approach, and to at least remember to ask, "Why are you asking that?

The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anectodes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt.

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the storyteller.

A pair of glasses on which the temperature and chance of rain pops up or someone's trying to schedule me for a project or a drink is not going to help with reveries about justice, meaning, and the beautiful deep marine blue of nearly every dusk.

A desk is no place to think on the large scale.

Memory of joy and liberation can become a navigational tool, an identity, a gift.

Writing is lonely, it's an intimate talk with the undead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers , with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later.

PomyÅ›lcie, jak wiele czasu i energii mogÅ'ybyÅ›my poÅ›wiÄ™ci? najró?niejszym wa?nym sprawom, gdybyÅ›my tylko nie byÅ'y a? tak zajÄ™te samym przetrwaniem.

Adulthood is made up of a prudent anticipation and a philosophical memory that make you navigate more slowly and steadily.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writer are writers they are readers, living books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the head of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the head of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you. Some are parties to which you are invited, full of friends who are there even when you have no friends. In some books you meet one remarkable person; in others a whole group or even a culture. Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying. Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles. Some long books are journeys, and at the end you are not the same person you were at the beginning.

El feminismo desea y busca cambiar todo el sistema humano; es cierto que muchos hombres ya se han unido a este proyecto, pero cómo beneficia a los hombres y de qué manera el statu quo actual también les daña son temas que merecen una reflexión más profunda.

That circle became a world whose rules I lived by, and I understood the moral of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you're farthest away when you're closest, sometimes the only way is the long one.

Introspection is often portrayed as an indoor, solitary thing, the monk in his cell, the writer at her desk.

often mild distraction that moves the imagination forward, not uninterrupted concentration.

for pilgrims, walking is work.

Si el dolor y la belleza están conectados, quizá con la madurez llega no lo que Nabhan llama abstracción, sino un sentido estético que compensa parcialmente las pérdidas que sufrimos con el tiempo y que encuentra belleza en lo distante.