Quotes About Reflection

The pilgrimage is one of the basic modes of walking, walking in search of something intangible

By now you've noticed that Woolf says "I don't know" quite a lot.

Books are solitudes in which we meet

Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation: one is mildly disconnected because one is walking, not because one is incapable of connecting.

Jewish tradition holds that some questions are more significant than their answers.

the landscape never looks the same coming and going, so turn around periodically and look at the view you'll see coming back.

Like a life, a journey assumes a shape and a meaning that are only clear afterward, and like a journey, a life requires that you learn to let go of the plan when the actuality departs from it, to embrace what's arriving, let go of what's departing, to move forward and not get stuck. You can cover the same ground with entirely different purposes.

The dead must be remembered, but the living are the monument.

There is a serenity in illness that takes away all the need to do and makes just being enough. In

Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul.

when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility, and what manifests there matters elsewhere, in ordinary times and in other extraordinary times.

Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel.

The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don't know you are looking for, and you don't know a place until it surprises you. Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against this erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect ineffable.

This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet.

People like us, Rose, we just want to live happy quiet lives, don't we? Little house. Enough to eat... That was all he'd wanted. And Rose wished with all her heart he could have had it. But she knew now that you can't change the past. It doesn't mean you have to forget it, but you can't change it and you can't stay there.

It's only when you've pieced together a story in several different ways that you realise where the holes are, discover the knowledge that is still missing, the questions you still need to ask.

Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.

I wish I knew then what I know now - and still had those thighs!

Every time I thought that I was put together, I realized that we're always putting ourselves together, gathering the world in, letting it sift down and form us.

How many years went by unnoticed, unembraced?

Uncountable the number off breaths I've taken for granted in my life.

sadness usually does, as soon as I sat down and began to listen. The small press had a correspondingly

the page swiftly. Sidda did not stop to correct herself, or to analyze why she was doing this. She simply glanced at the creekbank photo, sat at the cabin's table, and wrote from the heart. Oh, how Mama and the Ya-Yas laughed! I could hear them from the water where I played with