Quotes About Reflection

foolish men say things in anger that they later regret and an angry tongue does not mean one is guilty.

Family," she whispered. "So many people go through their lives with blinders on. They become self-involved and only want to think about their wants and their desires. They don't leave room for anything else, and then, too late, they realize how important their families were.

You don't remember what you said to me when I was inside you? She frowned with concentration while she thought about it. Hurry up?

I remember being called a pig. You do? You know good and well, I do. I was called a pig in two languages. You were? I was.

The young fought sleep, she thought, but the old relished it, and at the moment, she felt absolutely ancient.

Varian sat silent for a moment, his hands between his knees. All my life I've enjoyed perfect privilege, he said. American, rich, Protestant, Harvard-educated. I could walk down the street anywhere and feel, God help me, like a master.

He grieved too, Klara said, for the loss of a certain idea of himself.

If we could pin down the moments when our lives bifurcate into before and after-if we could pause the progression of milliseconds, catch ourselves at the point before we slip over the precipice-if we could choose to remain suspended on time-amber, our lives intact, our hearts unbroken, our foreheads unlined, our nights full of undisturbed sleep-would we slip, or would we choose the amber?

Later, your mother says, Didn't everything used to have a name?

the last complete sentence she ever utters is "It's a good thing there's birds.

Their old life seemed far away and remote to him now, like a dream he could not quite remember. The bright green grass, the roses, the house on the wide street not far from the sea -- that was another time, a different year.

And now here you are, sitting in your chair by the window, gazing out urgently, raptly at "your" tree—its shapely green canopy, its black velvety shadows, its sinuously curved trunk, its barky brown bark.

The pool is located deep underground, in a large cavernous chamber many feet beneath the streets of our town. And every time, when she gets to your face, she looks as if she is about to speak.

I never really even tried. But if I'm not a New York actress, what am I? I'm a person who takes a subway from the outer boroughs to lower Manhattan office every morning, who spends her days answering phones and doing copying, who is too disconsolate when she gets back to her apartment at night to do anything but sit on the couch and stare vacantly at reality TV shows until she falls asleep. Oh Godm it really was true, wasn't it? I really was a secretary.

My brother wrote another refrigerator magnet poem, when he was probably nineteen or twenty: 'When the flood comes/ I will swim to a symphony/ go by boat to some picture show/ and maybe I will forget about you.' How did he know way, way back then? How is it I know only now?

At the end I am always alone.

It's been years, and yet she still talks about my first New York studio like it was the hole in a Khmer Rouge prison.

The thing I keep learning about endings is that they aren't a long time coming, and that they don't sneak up on you either, because endings just don't happen.

Lulled by the calming music of ice clattering in the cocktail shaker, I began to ponder; this life we had going for ourselves

Any person who is carrying a lot of sadness needs to be able to rest sometimes, and to put it down.

and we both know how beautiful the book will be, how clearly it will speak to something within us—some previously unarticulated thought or reflection that, once recognized, we will never want to be without again.

Maybe the things she loved most weren't meant to be permanent. Maybe the fact that they existed was enough.

To me, a recently read novel was like a miniature planet: only a few hours earlier I had been breathing its air and living contentedly among its people - and now I was expected to pronounce a judgement about its worth?

Emotions are a reflection of our physical state, our actions, beliefs, and what is going on around us. All of those things are constantly changing. Therefore, a normal state is one that constantly changes too.