Quotes About Reflection

As it turned out, my fears were unwarranted. Which isn't to say you haven't changed. But the biggest change of all has been a measure of peace. The peace is not total, but in the face of a suffocating anxiety, a measure of peace is no small thing.

I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith.

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.

Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property!" Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther.

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 my 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.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. "Love is not consolation," she wrote. "It is light." 240.

Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea, which makes it hard for me to know which ideas feel bad because they have merit, and which ones feel bad because they don't

But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?

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. Bear

Jag skriver ner allt det här i blått bläck, så att jag ska minnas att alla ord, inte bara vissa, är skrivna i vatten.

187. Is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? Losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. More precise. One could leave it, too, as it is. -- Yet how can I explain, that every time I put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as I turn away from it?

Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says 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. (Can a reflection be a witness?)

How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted," says Goethe's sorrowful young Werther. "How clearly I still see it, and yet show no sign of improvement.

We sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't now. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we "get around" in the wirld. Some might also call it the source of our suffering.

As we think, we might remember that it matters not only with whom and what we choose to think; it also matters what spirit we choose to think with.

We sometimes weep in front of the mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

ag skriver ner allt det här i blått bläck, så att jag ska minnas att alla ord, inte bara vissa, är skrivna i vatten.

This is a simple story, but it spooks me, insofar as it reminds me that the eye is simply a recorder, with or without our will. Perhaps the same could be said of the heart. But whether there is a violence at work here remains undecided.

That's my depression talking. It's not "me." 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

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

or stays up all night watching colored shadows drift across the walls? At times I have done all of these things, but not in service of science, nor of philosophy, not even of poetry.

How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted