Quotes About Reflection

That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that's become my enemy because that's what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

How like art is what's left over after life.

He was continually called upon to explain himself and day by day it had grown harder so that by now there didn't seem to be any words, the right phrases hadn't been coined yet.

For the first time in his life he realized that sometimes in life you go through doors that only open one way. You can stand before them and think about whether you want to go through them or not. But when you do and the door closes behind you there is no way to go back. The door is featureless and unknobbed and smooth as a sheet of glass. You can pound on it and claw till your fingers are bleeding, scream until your throat is raw, but no one will open the door, no one will even hear you.

He seemed to be drawing inward toward some point at which he would be reduced to the fundamental essence of himself.

You don't learn that, she said. It's just there. It sounds like he spent his whole life trying to unlearn it. Trying to forget it.

What advice Phelan could possibly have given him. All these myriad differences between the world he was discovering and the world he'd been taught. There was nothing in Yeats or Eliot or Browning to cover this: had the situation been reversed, Phelan would probably have been coming to him for advice. He wondered how Eliot would have fared against the look in Sutter's dead eyes.

You afoot, the old man said. I knowed your walk the minute I seen you. You always walked like you had the world in your hip pocket. You ain't though, have you? Last time I seen you you was in a fine car. You had big plans.

Sometimes I think you're just too sweet to die Sometimes I think you're just too sweet to die Another time I think you oughta be buried alive. —RICHARD "RABBIT" BROWN, James Alley Blues, 1927

S]ometimes in life you go through doors that only open one way. You can stand before them and think about whether you want to go through them or not. But when you do and the door closes behind you there is no way to go back. The door is featureless and unknobbed and smooth as a sheet of glass. You can pound on it and claw till your fingers are bleeding, scream until your throat is raw, but no one will open the door, no one will even hear you.

Binder was living on the edge already and knowing it, knowing that he was spending time like money he might not be able to replace.

There is a tonic strength, in the hour of sorrow and affliction, in escaping from the world and society and getting back to the simple duties and interests we have slighted and forgotten. Our world grows smaller, but it grows dearer and greater. Simple things have a new charm for us, and we suddenly realize that we have been renouncing all that is greatest and best, in our pursuit of some phantom.

The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.

Philosophy is for the few.

What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education.

In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights, of a mind of uncommon excellence.

Pride always wants a little smarting.

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?