Quotes About Reflection

When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occassional cheese dip. ? John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Me pareció que era una bonita plegaria, así que miré a través de la ventana y empecé a rezar, pero mi mirada tropezó con la Biblia de neón, allá abajo, y no pude continuar. Entonces vi que las estrellas del cielo resplandecían con la hermosa plegaria y empecé de nuevo, recé sin pensar siquiera y ofrecí la oración a las estrellas y al cielo nocturno.

Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.

For every nice thing I ever done for you, I just get kicked around. I want to be treated nice by somebody before I die. You learnt everything, Ignatius, except how to be a human being

Get out of that womb-house for at least an hour a day. Take a walk, Ignatius. Look at the trees and birds. Realize that life is surging all around you. The valve closes because it thinks it is living in a dead organism. Open your heart and you will open your valve.

Then read from the treasured volume The poem of thy choice. And lend to the rhyme of the poet The beauty of thy voice. And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares, that infest the day, Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away.

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century.

Men can labor to make sense out of single steps toward the goal without ever pausing to reflect that the goal itself is ludicrous.

Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.

You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it's the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment. Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over.

What deceived me was my own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me.

I jounced the limb.

And sometimes you need too much to know the facts, and so humbly and stupidly you stay.

The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary with age, enfeebled, dry. So more the things remain the same, the more they change after all. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. Changed, I headed back though the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come out of the rain.

I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.

Let us pray. We all slumped immediately and unthinkingly in to the awkward crouch in which God was addressed.

I did not cry then or ever about Finney. I did not cry even when I stood watching him being lowered into his family's straightlaced burial ground outside of Boston. I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.

Until now, in spite of everything, I had welcomed each new day as though it were a new life, where all past failures and problems were erased, and all future possibilities and joys open and available, to be achieved probably before night fell again. Now, in this winter of snow and crutches with Phineas, I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of the night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn't make yourself over between dawn and dusk.

If only I had truly taken advantage of the situation, seized and held and prized the multitudes of advantages the summer offered me; if only I had.

I said a lot of things sarcastically that summer; that was my sarcastic summer

I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.

Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with good clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

moved by his own sermon.

My aid alone had never seemed to him in the category of help. The reason for this occurred to me as the procession moved slowly across the brilliant foyer to the doors; Phineas had thought of me as an extension of himself.