Quotes About Reflection

She put her head down on the table and cried all the tears that she knew she should have cried in the past year and a half. But they weren't ready then, they were now.

If you had your time all over again....? She was keen to know. You can't rewrite history. I have no idea what I'd do.

Next winter and next winter and next winter. In the mind they passed all slowly, like clouds across a summer sky, but a sudden call or turn of the head and they disappeared in a rush, shuttling quickly one after the last till nothing was left but a strangeness in the mind, a drop of thought that trembled and was gone, perhaps.

The past is never really gone. It's always with us, shaping who we are.

Sometimes the most important things in life are the things we take for granted.

Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty, it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness. Then what resentful wonder, and what half-aimless seeking. It is a silly state of affairs. It is a silly creature that tries to get a smile from even the most familiar and loving shadow. Comical and hopeless, the long gaze back is always turned inward.

All we have to face in the future is what has happened in the past. It is unbearable.

Instead of a last-gasp sprint, death can be a marathon.

When Death Is Close

If that's what dying is like, I think I can do it!

I don't see that many movies lately that are actually about something, that are trying to challenge something about the way that people interact.

Yet there it was: reflecting on the meaning of having been president of the United States, his first impulse was not to mention public service, or what he felt he'd accomplished, only that it appeared to be a vehicle for fame, and that many experiences were only worth having if someone else envied them.

Barrack told him that if he continued on this path he would create problems for a post–White House life, in which he was going to face existing investigations without the institution of the presidency behind him. Barrack asked him to think about his business, about everything he had built over the decades and the support he still needed.

229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.

This slice of truth, offered in the final hour, ended up beginning a new chapter of my adulthood, the one in which I realized that age doesn't necessarily bring anything with it, save itself. The rest is optional.

I can remember a time when I took Henry James's advice--'try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!'--deeply to heart. I think I was then imagining that the net effect of becoming one of those people would be one of accretion. Whereas if you truly become someone on whom nothing is lost, then loss will not be lost upon you, either.

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.

To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you?

And certainly there are many speakers whom I'd like to see do more trembling, more unknowing, more apologizing.

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it? No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink-- Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

I think you overestimate the maturity of adults, he wrote me in his final letter, a letter he sent only after I'd broken down and written him first, after a year of silence.

two Popsicles are talking to each other. One accuses, "You're more interested in fantasy than reality". The other responds, "I'm interested in the reality of my fantasy." Both of the Popsicles are melting of their sticks.

Girls are cruelest to themselves," observes Anne Carson in "The Glass Essay," her brilliant long poem about the ravages of female anger, loneliness, grief, and desire, giving us as poetic adage what any number of other fields give us as statistic.