Quotes About Reflection

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. 72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

How often I've imagined the bubble of body and breath you and I made, even though by now I can hardly remember what you look like, I can hardly see your face.

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

How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world be, in essence, the fingerprints of god? I will try to explain this.

Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet.

I would also like to cop easily to my abundant privilege - except that the notion of privilege as something to which one could "easily cop," as in "cop to once and be done with," is ridiculous. Privilege saturates, privilege structures.

You must spend more time thinking about the divine.

No more words from the field! Thus begins the slow slide back to my life, back to the plans I drew before the summer became the summer of wanting you

one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

I can go for days without thinking about it; at other times it feels like a defining moment. It means nothing. It means everything.

We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

She walks slowly. She wants to feel the prick, the push of every bit of gravel under her shoe. She wants to feel every scratch, every discomfort of this....her leaving walk.

She is not yet where she needs to be, in the forest, alone, with the trees over her head. She is not alone.

That's because they're of the past. All photos of the past look melancholy and wistful precisely because they capture something that's gone.

She thinks, This cannot happen, it cannot, how will we live, what will we do, how can Judith bear it, what will I tell people, how can we continue, what should I have done, where is my husband, what will he say, how could I have saved him, why didn't I save him, why didn't I realise that it was he who was in danger? And then, the focus narrows, and she thinks: He is dead, he is dead, he is dead.

When you're a child, no one tells you that you are going to die. You have to work it out for yourself.

What I wish I had known, aged twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don't go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.

She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.

Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager? Is this retrogression cumulative? Will she continue to lose a decade a day?

How is it these children, these young women came from her? What relation do they bear to the small beings she once nursed and dandled and washed?

To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.

Morirse será así, notar que algo se acerca y que no se puede evitar? Este pensamiento surge de la nada y le cae en la cabeza como una gota de vino en el agua, la mancha, oscura y expansiva, le colorea las ideas.

Not for the first time, it strikes her that she will never feel that again, that it is an experience now closed to her, at her age, at her stage in life. The loss of that possibility sears her sometimes: it is hard for a woman to let go of; harder still if another woman in your household is just entering that state. The sight of this girl's stomach, every time, makes Mary think of the emptiness, the quiet of her own.

moment. He gives a half-smile. 'That is true,' he