Quotes About Reflection

One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.

Possibly in the lobby she saw someone who reminded her too much of herself (that can happen to inexperienced travelers). Or worse. That no one there reminded her of anyone she ever knew.

to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a present to myself but haven't made much progress there—though I need to.

And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could've been. It can be corrupting. I

For the two of us, ours was just a version of life briefly perfected (though in a way that showed me something) and that ended.

I'm not a great hoper, Wade, I guess. We're not walking fast. Others pass us. I just go in for generic hopes. That good comes to me, that I do little harm and die in my sleep.

Would you think he was anybody like you?

Sometimes we do not really become adults until after we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes

Voyez-vous, d'après mon expérience, c'est quand on a l'impression de ne pas progresser qu'on avance sans doute le plus. »

Though when I turn to regard life -- my own or others'-- I now never fail to be struck, amid the onslaught of all that's happened and still is happening, by how much that's gone from me. Absences seem to surround and intrude upon everything. Though in acknowledging this, I cannot let it be a loss or even be a fact I regret, since that is merely how life is--another enduring truth we must notice.

I believe I have done these two things. Faced down regret. Avoided ruin. And I am still here to tell about it.

Things you did,things you never did,things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

Cosas que hiciste. Cosas que nunca hiciste. Cosas que soñaste. Al cabo de un largo tiempo se juntan todas.

apropos of nothing.

We drove up onto the interstate and went toward Spokane, where I had lived once and Arlene had, too, though we didn't know each other then the old days, before marriage and children and divorce, before we met the lives we would eventually lead, and that we would be happy with or not.

for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret.

bobby pins in it. On the wall

The world requires me to re-write its wretched dialogue!

The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.

I remember the revelation it was to me when I realized I'd rather be smart in the way Elvis Presley was than in the way, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein was. The thing was, you could imagine you could be smart like Wittgenstein by just thinking hard enough, but Elvis just had it. It was almost spiritual. A kind of grace.

reimagining your life is going to be messy.

Reflection opens up hope.

Repacking is all about the why; it's