Quotes About Reflection

there's going to be lots in this world you're going to feel bad about. Save your regret for the important things, okay?

Meloux closed his eyes, lifted his face to the sun, breathed deeply. "That is all of life," the old Mide said quietly. "What?" Stephen asked. "Letting go of the questions. Letting go of the fear that there will be no answers." "Will there be answers?" "What we believe we want is like knocking on a closed door. Better to open ourselves to what we have and what we know. The beauty of this moment.

Maybe the dead have finally gone to rest." "They never do, Bo." He thought about the dead who were with him now and who always would be, and he knew Otter was right.

William Kent Krueger

He looked at his hands. Big hands. How useless a man's hands were, he thought, when it came to fixing the important things."

Ghosts. There were too many of them in his life now. He lifted his glass, and with the last swallow of his sherry, he toasted the dead.

is wise, and if we listen to it, we will understand how to breathe again. I hope Meloux is right.

Akama made a small bow. "I can see why he fears you. You are very much alike.

A sensible man keeps out of politics

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions.

It is hardly in human nature that a man should quite accurately gauge the limits of his own insight; but it is the duty of those who profit by his work to consider carefully where he may have been carried beyond it.

Si una persona, al sostener una creencia que le fue enseñada en la niñez o de la que fue persuadida más tarde, rebaja y echa al un lado todas las dudas sobre ella que broten en su mente, evita a propósito la lectura de libros y la compañía que la cuestione o la discuta, y ve como impías aquellas preguntas que no puedan contestarse fácilmente sin perturbarla, entonces la vida de esa persona es un único y largo pecado contra la humanidad.

How do you go to your own house when something has gone bad on the inside, when it doesn't seem like your place to live anymore, when you almost cannot recall living there although it was the place you mostly ate and slept for all your grown-up life? Try to remember two or three things about living there. Try to remember cooking one meal.

Sometimes there is no choice but to walk into your own house. Far away, you think, and you do not want to see. You come home and you say do not tell me. You say, I have hunted the elk all over the snowfields of the Selway, and I do not want to know what happened here. And then there is a morning you walk in and take a look in your own house, like any traveler.

It's as if your parents have to die before you really understand who they are.

Life's two Great Questions Why me and What do I do now

I love books. They connect you with the past and the present, with original minds and noble spirits, with what living has been and meant to others. They instruct, inspire, shake you up, make you laugh and weep, think and dream. But while they do enhance experience, they are not a substitute for it.

We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.

Every father knows the disconcerting when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self...made real and flesh. He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person.

The rest-the vast majority, tens of thousands of days-are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest. We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories...But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and 'The End' is never the end.

My childhood ended that summer. I learned the word murder. But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that...You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to...see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you.

both remembered how it all started, and even now, in the middle of my middle age, when I think of that shining young girl, I still feel a little thrill of first love, still there, still burning like a pilot light.

I could not help seeing in Laurie the ghost of her younger self, the teenaged girl with a lovely, full, heart-shaped face. I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known. Laurie

A good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it.