Quotes About Reflection

Loneliness is the diary keeper's lover. It is not narcissism that takes them to their desk every day. And who "keeps" whom, after all? The diary is demanding; it imposes its routine; it must be chored the way one must milk a cow; and it alters your attitude toward life, which is lived, finally, only in order that it may makes it way to the private page. [From "Fifty Literary Pillars", p.35]

The novel does not say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my toes.

A book is like a deck of windows

Leaves move in the windows. I cannot tell you yet how beautiful it is, what it means. But they do move. They move in the glass.

All that could happen was alone with me and I was alone with it.

it strikes me that the spirit of the Fourth, this year, was used up by September's end and fell like an early leaf.

I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.

And I am in retirement from love.

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.

I'm sure I have a process, but it mostly takes place in my dreams.

My job is to bore you and let the hardness of your seat and the warmth of your robe prepare you for what is to come.

A smart man learns from experience; a wise man learns from the experience of others.

In the end, it comes down, as it always comes down, to each individual human being doing what he—or she—must to live with himself/herself.

God works in history, therefore a contemplative who has no sense of history, no sense of historical responsibility, is not fully a Christian contemplative.

we are forever getting confused into thinking that scripture is mainly about what we are supposed to do rather than a picture of who God is.

Time! where didst thou those years inter Which I have seene decease?

When I look back now over my life and call to mind what I might have had simply for taking and did not take, my heart is like to break.

Whenever anybody whom we love dies, we discover that although death is commonplace it is terribly original. We may have thought about it all our lives, but if it comes close to us, it is quite a new, strange thing to us, for which we are entirely unprepared. It may, perhaps, not be the bare loss so much as the strength of the bond which is broken that is the surprise, and we are debtors in a way to death for revealing something in us which ordinary life disguises.

Whom do I love? I love someone because I expect something from that person. I expect him to behave in a way that I like. The moment he starts to behave in a different way, all my love is gone. Then do I really love this person or myself?

There is an art of which every man should be a master the art of reflection. If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?

As we learn about each other, so we learn about ourselves

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.