Quotes About Reflection

I realized then that for all of us, part of the process of Mom's dying was mourning not just her death but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don't really lose the person who has been; you have all those memories.

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead,

The latter therapy has its roots in a philosophy called Naikan, developed by Ishin Yoshimoto. Naikan reminds people to be grateful for everything. If you are sitting in a chair, you need to realize that someone made that chair, and someone sold it, and someone delivered it—and you are the beneficiary of all that. Just because they didn't do it especially for you doesn't mean you aren't blessed to be using it and enjoying it.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

I guess we're all in it together," she said. And I couldn't help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We're all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one. I

I'd read in Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,

I often forget that other people's stories aren't simply introductions to my own more engaging, more dramatic, more relevant, and better-told tales, but rather ends in themselves, tales I can learn from or repeat or dissect or savor.

the book, Lamott says the two best prayers are "Help me, Help me, Help me" and "Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.

When we ask one another "What are you reading?" sometimes we discover the ways that we are similar; sometimes the ways that we are different. Sometimes we discover things we never knew we shared; other times we open ourselves up to exploring new worlds and ideas. "What are you reading?" isn't a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it's really a way of asking, "Who are you now and who are you becoming?

It was like before I was in a noisy church in a big city. Now it's like I'm in a beautiful monastery that no human has visited for a thousand years.

I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch,

when you are running away from something, it often ends up coming with you, especially if the thing you are running away from is your own behavior.

it felt like I was headed right back to where I started—that once again I could lose everything I had, and that maybe I didn't deserve any of it. Maybe I had done something wrong.

Good books often answer question you did not even know you wanted to ask

books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose—electronic (even though that wasn't for her) or printed, or audio—is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation. Mom

one of the things I learned from Mom is this: Reading isn't the opposite of doing; it's the opposite of dying.

He longed for a minute that didn't matter: perhaps for time to take a nap or watch something silly on television without feeling guilt or regret. He needed relief from the feeling that he was wasting precious time, not the added pressure of life's greatest to-do list. I now realize that humans require down time. Quiet time is necessary to process all that happens to us on a daily basis—let alone over the course of a life.

One of Mom's favorite passages from Gilead was: "This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

For the rest, silence or good music, not much food, a lot of solitude, walks on the Heath, the time to think while others... well, often fall apart. Not so bad, not so bad at all. Being queer and self-sufficient is the best present at this season.

As the psychologist Professor Brian Little writes, 'All individuals are essentially scientists erecting and testing their hypotheses about the world and revising them in the light of their experience.

Sometimes I feel as if there's an explanation to my life that continues to escape me; that I've missed something noble, something sublime; that in some way I have cheated myself...life is so strange, so harsh.