Quotes About Reflection

It is better to waste your old age than to do nothing at all with it.

Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared.

but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

Memory is identity. I have believed this since – oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instability beneath our feet.

History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

It had all begun, very precisely, he told his mind, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, at Arkhangelsk railway station. No, his mind responded, nothing begins just like that, on a certain date at a certain place. It all began in many places, and at many times, some even before you were born, in foreign countries, and in the minds of others. —

Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.

And this is where the Silent Ones cause further offense. They do not understand (how could they?) that they have a new function in your life. You need your friends not just as friends, but also as corroborators. The chief witness to what has been your life is now silenced, and retrospective doubt is inevitable.

I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.

He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.

Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards.

Old love is a row of beach huts in November.

I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life.

Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.

The ability to see and examine himself; the ability to make moral decisions and act on them; the mental and physical courage of his suicide. "He took his own life" is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands—and then out of them. How few of us—we that remain—can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories.

And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can't.

Such was humanity's self-love, Nadar concluded, that most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves.

But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.

Voleo bih da je život kao bankarstvo', rekao sam. 'Ne mislim doslovno. Ima tu vrlo komplikovanih stvari. Ali, na kraju sve shvatiš ako se samo potrudiš. Ili uvek postoji negde neko ko se razume, pa makar i naknadno, kad je ve? kasno. Nevolja sa životom, kako se meni ?ini, jeste da može ve? za sve da bude kasno, a da ti ipak i dalje ništa ne shvataš.

Every day is Sunday"—that wouldn't make a bad epitaph, would it?

But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional.

Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.