Quotes About Reflection

I think about you more and more, but I don't waste my time - or yours - thinking about who you were before I knew you.

You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..

If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.

You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.

Life, Garp wrote, is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

The hardest thing to accept about the passage of time is that the people who mattered most to us are all wrapped up in parenthesis

And never forget, there is memory.

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.' (David Copperfield) "But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.

No one could have fathomed what a life he'd led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.

You live your life at the time you live it -- you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

Isn't it amazing? The Americans have so many good afterthoughts!

When people die, Vargas - I mean the people you will always remember, the ones who changed your life - they never really go away, Pepe told the young doctor.

Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves—to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!

Nostalgia! Miss Frost cried. You´re nostalgic! She repeated. Just how old are you, William? She asked. Seventeen, I told her. Seventeen! Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. Well, William Abbott, if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!

You should wait, William, Miss Frost said. The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.

People regard art too highly, and history not enough

Behind every journey is a reason

If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show, he recited from memory.

In every life," Dolores had said, "I think there's always a moment when you must decide where you belong.