Quotes About Reflection

I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.

Let the grave mound grow a little grass, I always say; then it's safe to look.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.

Juan Diego lived there, in the past—reliving, in his imagination, the losses that had marked him.

If you live long enough, Bill - it's a world of epilogues, Richard Abbott said.

You are never over your childhood, not until you are under the train—unter dem Zug.

Homer Wells, listening to Big Dot Taft, felt like her voice – dulled. Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he'd so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without noticing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?

Remember, Duncan asked on the plane, how Walt asked if it was green or brown? Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.

It often happens with grown-ups that their tears are misunderstood. (Who can know which time in their lives they are reliving?)

And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.

Jack realized that when you're happy – especially when it's the first time in your life – you think of things that would never have occurred to you when you were unhappy.

What would Miss Frost have thought of me? I wondered; I didn't mean my writing . What would she have thought of my relationships with men and women? Had I ever protected anyone? For whom had I truly been worthwhile?

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!

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't.

but 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.

Vielleicht muss es im Leben eines Schriftstellers diesen Augenblick geben, in dem ein anderer Schriftsteller beschuldigt wird, seinen Beruf verfehlt zu haben.

History is composed of the smallest, often undetected mistakes.

Love also floats. And, that being true, love probably resembles Sorrow in other ways.

Don't grown-ups ever get over things?

Importantly, it was in this out north to Steering, with the real Ellen James sleep and in his care, that T. S. Garp decided he would try to be more like his mother, Jenny Fields. A thought, it occurred to him, that would have pleased his mother greatly if it had only come to him when she was alive.

A what?" said Egg. No doubt he thought that an inferiority complex was a weapon; sometimes, I guess, it is.

Okay," I said. There are these moments when you see the course of your life unfolding, and you feel powerless to alter it.

I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become.

But Vienna was in its death phase; it lay still and let me look at it, and think about it, and look again. In a living city, I could never have noticed so much. Living cities don't hold still.