Quotes About Reflection

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'.

finding another woman can bring an exceptional clarity of mind to a man all of a sudden.

My parents' marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a 'car crash of of cliché' is itself a cliché.

And perhaps I I didn't even understand the young when I was young. That could be true too.

When we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However Ã¢â'¬Â¦ who said that thing about "the littleness of life that art exaggerates"? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.

His life had not been wrecked. His heart, yes, his heart had been cauterised. But he had found a way to live, and continued with that life, which had brought him to here. And from here, he had a duty to see himself as he had once been. Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can't change.

Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.

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

Later—well, what came later, came later.

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

Constance: Tell me, what happened to William's little maid? I never saw her again after that dinner. Mary Maceachran: Elsie? -- She's gone. Constance: Oh, it's a pity, really. I thought it was a good idea to have someone in the house who is actually sorry he's dead.

at my age, one must ration one's excitement

The past, as we have been told so many times, is a foreign country where things are done differently.

But then, as she told herself, who would learn better than she that hindsight is a prism that alters everything?

They say one sign of growing old is that the past becomes more real than the present and already I can feel the fingers of those lost decades closing their grip round my imagination, making more recent memory seem somehow greyer and less bright.

The essential point here is that there are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously worked over; then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later justified by logic.

Julian Thompson

Así es cómo funciona el olvido: eliminando el pasado y no hablando nunca de él.

even a poisoned, desolate childhood can be missed.

Vale, entonces un recuerdo. ¿Tiene que ser feliz? —No. Prefiero que sea verdadero a que sea feliz.

She feels a great pang of loss, an unexpected welling of sorrow mixed with confusion.

When I first met you, I thought we were made for each other even though we seemed like opposites in some ways and we fought. But now... What? Now I feel like we weren't made for each other. We're making each other—into the people we should become. Do you know what I mean?

New losses dig up past losses, as if one needs the other to remember how it's done.