Quotes About Reflection

as for knowing your own mind, this seemed a bewildering process. How could you know your own mind without using your mind to discover your mind in the first place?

I can't do anything to you now, but time can. Time will tell. It always does.

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards.

Look what she has lost, now that she has lost life. Her body, her spirit; her radiant curiosity about life. At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian's fragment set off in me. There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave me a sense of unease, of unrest.

But time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

lethargic meliorist;

Major General Anders later reflected: I think it was the Earthrise that really kind of got everybody in the solar plexus Ã¢â'¬Â¦ We were looking back at our planet, the place where we evolved. Our Earth was quite colorful, pretty and delicate compared to the very rough, rugged, beat-up, even boring lunar surface. I think it struck everybody that here we'd come 240,000 miles to see the Moon and it was the Earth that was really worth looking at.

Constantly he went back over the evidence of his memories.

My train was late, slowed by the usual Sunday engineering work. I got home in the early evening. I remember that I had a bloody good long shit.

The more so because, among its repetitions, it is always looking for new ways to prick you.

Hoe vaak vertellen we ons eigen levensverhaal? Hoe vaak stellen we bij, verfraaien we, laten we handig dingen weg? En hoe langer het leven doorgaat, hoe minder er om ons heen overblijven om onze versie te betwisten, ons eraan te herinneren dat ons leven niet ons leven is, maar alleen het verhaal dat wij erover verteld hebben. Verteld aan anderen, maar - voornamelijk - aan onzelf.

The sadness of life. That was another conundrum he would occasionally ponder.

I didn't want the day to unravel. Though looking back, it was not the day, but the four of us, that were beginning to unravel.

He felt life more clearly too—even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn't worth the candle.

you find yourself repeating, "They grow up so quickly, don't they?" when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is "success" in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both?

People say of death, "There's nothing to be frightened of." They say it quickly, casually. Now let's say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. "There's NOTHING to be frightened of." Jules Renard: "The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word 'nothing.

Viver sozinho tem momentos de auto-comiseração e paranóia.

You find yourself repeating, They grow up so quickly, don't they? when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

That next week was one of the loneliest of my life. There seemed nothing left to look forward to.

I would find myself staring resentfully at people on buses merely going home at the end of their day. How could they sit there so idly and unknowingly, their indifferent profiles on display, when the world was about to be changed?

If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours.