Quotes About Reflection

I hate that phrase: move on. Like no matter what happened or what you did, you just "move on," and that's supposed to make everything all right.

Writing is… a descent into the self.

Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.

My nose remembers more than my eyes. The sharp oily smell of eucalyptus combines with afternoon dust from the hockey field. But my heart feels the different then and now.

There were times, in the beginning, when I used my journal as a wailing wall, but I learned not to immortalize the darkness. Rereading it was counterproductive. What I needed was a place in which to collect the light.

Writing is a deeply spiritual act that can have a profound effect upon the practitioner.

We were all so young that there were no lines on our faces to read between.

Falling silent should be cultivated, the way the woods fall silent in the snow. Messages you can't send any other way can be heard.

I can feel my heart growing daily, which has its uncomfortable aspects, as if it could fall with the weight of love and break.

Writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that can lower you below or hoist you above the surface of your life, enabling you to go deeper or higher than you would otherwise go. What excites me about his metaphor is that is makes writing much more than a lifesaving venture.

Everything we are given or learn or possess in any real sense - - the ability to play Beethoven sonata, write books, understand the principles of physics – is intended for one thing: to draw us closer to our selves.

To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart"- Phyllis Theroux

If you don't consider your life a pilgrimage, it gets downgraded to a trip or even an aimless journey. It is we who make that decision.

getting older is not a gift. But we had better make it one or be left with the knowledge that we have been ungrateful for life itself.

There is guidance for each of us," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.

Before you laugh at someone's misfortune, have a moment to walk in their shoes. Now, you've LOL-ed and you have their shoes.

But there's not enough time in life to go sit at a party, have a drink, and make idle conversation. There's too many important things to do. Just being together with my husband, spending time alone, which I have very little of.

You go into the dark to get away from what you know, and if you go far enough, you realize, suddenly, that you'll never really make it back into the light.

When you're hurrying around too quickly," he had said, "there's a part of the world you can't see. If, for example, you're taking a wrong direction in your life, it's only when you stop and look at things clearly that you can revise your direction and take a more proper course. Then message of Zen is that in order to find ourselves, we've got to learn to stop.

a man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn't have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing.

Home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere, and not the things that tie you down.

greatest surprises I have encountered has been that the people who seem wisest about the necessity of placing limits on the newest technologies are, often, precisely the ones who helped develop those technologies, which have bulldozed over so many of the limits of old. The very people, in short, who have worked to speed up the world are the same ones most sensitive to the virtue of slowing down.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life," Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, "is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you." Or, as Annie Dillard, who sat still for a long time at Tinker Creek—and in many other places—has it, "I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend.

many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it's often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize.