Quotes About Reflection

There was no meaning in it, not then and now now, but you can't write that, can you?

Dorrigo felt a warm

good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

I am a part of all that I have met.

All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.

We are past the end of things now, but I don't want to leave.

When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again--which is a loss. But to shield yourself--as I didn't do--seems to be an even greater error, since what's lost is the truth of your parents' life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in.

I thought that the difference between a successful life and an unsuccessful one, between me at that moment and all the people who owned the cars that were nosed-in to their proper places in the lot, maybe between me and that woman out in the trailers by the gold mine, was how well you were able to put things like this out of your mind and not be bothered by them, and maybe too, by how many troubles like this one you had to face in a lifetime.

In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples' worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to make myself feel better.

Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road.

All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done.

The things you'll never do don't get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can't see the dim light at either end.

Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.

I don't look in mirrors anymore. It's cheaper than surgery.

And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn't be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can't fix anyway. Telling

It was as if I'd already left some time before and was just catching up with myself.

Just exactly what that good life was--the one I expected--I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between.

It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant--often it happened in the middle of the night--and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.

when you're young your opponent is the future; but when you're not young, your opponent's the past and everything you've done in it and the problem of getting away from it.

Probably many people's vision of "thinking something through" is of this nature: you do precisely what you want to do—if you can.

entering the past is a precarious business, since the past strives but always half-fails to make us who we are.

Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.