Quotes About Reflection

He liked the way the obsidian reflected his light, the way its slick surfaces caught fire as he passed. Of course, he did not consider how black it would be when he was gone. My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it.

But there was no wound she could give me that I had not already given myself.

The last thing I think is: Achilles.

All my life I have been moving forward, and now I am here. I have a mortal's voice, let me have the rest. I lift the brimming bowl to my lips and drink.

But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.

I have aged. When I look in my polished bronze mirror, there are lines upon my face. I am thickened too and my skin has begun growing loose. I cut myself with my herbs and the scars stay. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes I am vain and dissatisfied. But I do not wish myself back. Of course my flesh reaches for the earth. That is where it belongs.

I have heard that men who live by a waterfall cease to hear it—in such a way did I learn to live beside the rushing torrent if his doom.

That old sickening feeling returned: that every moment of my life I had been a fool.

With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. 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.

The scars themselves I offered to wipe away. He shook his head. "How would I know myself?

Too late, I thought. Too late for all the things I should have known. I had made so many mistakes that I could not find my way back through their tangle to the first one.

I wish he had let you all die

At first it is strange. I am used to keeping him from her, to hoarding him for myself. But the memories well up like springwater, faster than I can hold them back. They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth. This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.

Do not listen to your enemy, Odysseus had once told me. Look at them. It will tell you everything.

All those years I had spent with them were like a stone tossed in a pool. Already, the ripples were gone.

I had walked the earth for a hundred generations, yet I was still a child to myself.

As it turned out, I did kill pigs that night after all.

I had known contentment before, brief snatches of time in which I pursued solitary pleasure: skipping stones or dicing or dreaming. But in truth, it had been less a presence than an absence, a laying aside of dread:

I had a wild thought there, beneath that sky. I will eat these herbs. Then whatever is truly in me, let it be out, at last. I brought them to my mouth. But my courage failed. What was I truly? In the end, I could not bear to know.

Beneath my feet were the bones of a thousand years. I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.

He smiled at me, and I saw the lines where other smiles had been.

Nothing she says has a single meaning, nor a single intention, yet she is steady. She knows herself.

He admired the world like a jewel, turning its facets to catch the light.

It was a trick of his, to set a sentence out like a plate on a table and see what you would put on it. But he surprised me by continuing.