Quotes About Reflection

When you know your time in a place is running out, you try to fix such moments in your mind's eye.

Recuerdo que algún día yo le hablé de mi río y una como tormenta se agitó en sus estrañas. No sé si fue mi pecho que tembló de recuerdo o si fueron mis ojos que asomaron nostalgias. I remember a day when I spoke of my river and something like a storm stirred in his being. Was it my breast that trembled with the memory Was it nostalgia that showed through my eyes

But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves.

Before heading back up the road, she had turned for a moment toward the sea. In the late afternoon light, the water was gray wrinkled with orange. Tiger water, she called it when it looked like that. Rhino water was smooth and leaden, dull as smoke. But her favorite was polar bear water, when the moon hung low and large, as if too heavy to rise very high, and scattered great radiant patches, like ice floes, across a dark blue ocean.

the monotony of quiet creativity, imagination fueled by routine and isolation

He pictured her living alone in that tranquil house with its fine old furnishings, tending her flowers and fruit trees.

perch on the wall

She'd met Colin on a Monday. She'd kissed him on a Friday. Twelve years later. She sighed. It seemed fairly pathetic.

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

Life and reading are not separate activities, When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling.

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.

Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person, and find them still.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?

The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.