Quotes About Reflection

Light from the tanks found him, as if they could collect all the irreconcilable parts of his life. No matter how many lights they shone, they could never take away the darkness. Daylight was blinding, but in the dark he still existed. What did they see, he wondered, his hands still open. Of all the people he had loved and who had loved him, of all the things that he had witnessed, lived and hoped for, of all the music he had created, how much was it possible to see?

It's only now, in hindsight, that I think she saw her own disappearance as a quality to be desired. That perhaps she needed, finally, to live unobserved.

One thing I have learned, dear Sparrow, is that light is never still and solid and so it is with love. Light can be split into many directions. Its nature is to break apart. My

What must it feel like, I wondered, to begin again? Would I still be the same person if I woke up in a different language and another existence?

The concerto's beauty was even more impassioned than he remembered, and also more piteous and quiet and restrained, and he clasped his hands together to absorb both the grief and joy in his body.

What happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?

In the end, I believe these pages and the Book of Records return to the persistence of this desire: to know the times in which we are alive. To keep the record that must be kept and also, finally, to let it go.

The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that live invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.

She says that she held on to the memory as if it were a touchstone, something that could anchor her. She knows, has always believed, that there is a secret that has coloured her life, her childhood. In the last few months, she has felt as if, day by day, she is losing her footing. There are fissures, openings, that she no longer knows how to cover over.

did I yearn for a new eye as a window to the outside world, or for the world to look in on me?

Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.

She wanted to tell them that whatever happened, whatever they chose, one day they would have to come awake, everyone would have to stand up and confront themselves and realize it wasn't the party that made them do it. One day, they would be alone with their actions.

Surely another story could serve the same purpose, and lift her out of her solitude.

It embarassed her ow, the way she bruned candles so unthikingly, gazing at words that seemed to hide ideas, or ideas inexpressible in words, how the sentences had carried her forwards like a river or a piece of music. And yet how close the truth had seemed back then. She had been twenty-four years old and she had fallen in love.

His sonata for piano and violin, he first piece of music he had written in twenty-three years, was finished, he could not do more. He made a clean copy, isnged his name and wrote the date, May, 27, 1989, and the title, The Sun Shines on the People's Square. He put the copy in an envelope to send to Kai. [...] He saw himself walking out of the room, this alleyway, this city, without turning back. The following morning, he put on his uniform and returned to work

What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?

For life is the mirror of king and slave, 'Tis just what we are and do Then give to the world the best you have, And the best will come back to you.

Stop thinking like a madman, or you will end up acting like an ass.

I never hated you. My anger was never with you, but with the little hell my heart had put me in. The anger always passed. I never regretted loving you. If I had gone to my grave never kissing you or touching you, I still would not have thought it a wasted love.

Utter ruin provokes soul-searching in even the least reflective of men.

We are never free of our past, but we can be free of its unwanted intrusion into our relationship with our children and the ways in which we choose to parent. Being a parent gives us the extraordinary opportunity for a "do-over." Once again we are in a parent-child relationship, but this time we hold the cards. We can use the best of what we learned from our own parents and change the things that were out of synch or hurtful. This time around, we get to choose.

But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

I lay back and tried not to think of the minutes passing. Just yesterday we had a wealth of them. Now each was a drop of heartsblood lost.