Quotes About Reflection

If Richard had lived, perhaps... but one cannot look backwards, only forwards. What has passed has passed for ever. What is it Heraclitus says? One Cannot step in the same river twice?' ... 'More or less. I suppose a more accurate way of putting it would be You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.

No point in thinking," she said briskly, "you just have to get on with life." (She really was turning into Miss Woolf.) "We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try." (The transformation was complete.) "What if we had a chance to do it again and again," Teddy said, "until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?" "I think it would be exhausting.

How wonderfully, joyously, untrammeled he had been then in his happiness. She thought it was fixed for ever, she didn't realize that childhood happiness dissolves away. If she had realized that Archie wasn't going to be that sunny innocent child for ever she would have laid up every moment as treasure.

She had never chosen death over life before and as she was leaving she knew something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed. Then the dark obliterated all thoughts.

Long lazy days like these will never come again in your life. You think they will but they won't.' -Sylvie

The past is what you take with you.

Juliet sighed and wondered if one day she would think herself to death. Was that possible? And would it be painful?

It's funny, isn't it, Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.

There were so many facts that Amelia no longer felt certain about (or perhaps she had never known them). She would soon be nearer fifty than forty, and she was sure that every day she could feel more neural pathways disappearing—fusing and arcing and dying—leaving her unable to retrieve information.

Why did people understand how precious each day was only once the doors to the grave had opened and they had looked inside? What was the point of that?

The kid looked up from her wampum and stared inscrutably at her and then, for the first time since Tracy bought her, Courtney smiled. A beatific sunbeam of a smile. Tracy beamed back, a bubble-burst of mixed emotion – ecstasy and agony in equal, confusing measure inside her – rising in her chest. Jesus. How did parents manage with this kind of stuff on a daily basis? She found herself blinking back tears.

The war had been a tide that had receded and now here it was lapping around her ankles again.

Another day where nothing has happened, he thought. That was a good thing, he reminded himself. What was the Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times.

I myself am usually to be found lying on the bed imitating the dead Chatterton, killing time by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds i´ve discovered so far).

More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere

Ursula tried to remember what her own last words to her father had been. A nonchalant 'See you later,' she concluded. The final irony. 'We never know when it will be the last time,' she said...

Amelia looked at the eggs-like sickly, jaundiced eyes-and thought of her own eggs, a handful left, old shrivelled like musty dried fruit where once they must have been bursting toward the light-

Really, every time a person said good-bye to another person, they should pay attention, just in case it was the last time. First things were good, last things not so much so.

Teddy wandered amongst the graves. Most of the people in them had died long before his time. Ursula was picking up conkers from the stand of magnificent horse chestnuts at the far end of the churchyard. They were enormous trees and Teddy wondered if their roots had intertwined with the bones of the dead, imagined them curling a path through ribcages and braceleting ankles and fettering wrists. When

He is the best man who, when making his plans, fears and reflects on everything that can happen to him, but in the moment of action is bold.

This man, I say, is most perfect who shall have understood everything for himself, after having devised what may be best afterward and unto the end.

But he who neither thinks for himself nor learns from others, is a failure as a man.

For a sick man the world begins at his pillow and ends at the foot of his bed.

Rare is the man who suffers no remorse as he passes from the state of confidant to that of rival.