Quotes About Reflection

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out it discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something—anything—before it is all gone.

From start to finish I found no strangers. If I had, I might be able to report them more objectively. But these are my people and this my country. If I found matters to criticize and to deplore, they were tendencies equally present in myself.

Al bent over her. And he saw the bright evening star reflected in her eyes, and he saw the black cloud reflected in her eyes.

For hours he would lie absorbed in the economy of the ground.

Only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighing of oneself against the world and the world against itself. A busy man cannot find time for such balancing. We do not think a lazy man can commit murders, nor great thefts, nor lead a mob. He would be more likely to think about it and laugh. And a nation of lazy contemplative men would be incapable of fighting a war unless their very laziness were attacked. Wars are the activities of busy-ness.

To hell with that rotten century! Let's get it over and the door closed shut on it! Let's close it like a book and go on reading! New chapter, new life. A man will have clean hands once we get the lid slammed shut on that stinking century. It's a fair thing ahead. There's no rot on this clean new hundred years. It's not stacked, and any bastard who deals seconds from this new deck of years— why, we'll crucify him head down over a privy.

I hope you know what you're doing when you issue me a license to talk. I've heard two ways of looking at it. One says the silent man is the wise man and the other that a man without words is a man without thought. Naturally I favor the second

They reminded him of something—what was it?—some memory, some picture. He strove to find it and then it came of itself. It rose out of the years complete with all its colours and its cries, its crowded feelings.

It's nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world.

I wonder about people who say they haven't time to think. [...] Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.

Sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.

Just Jim Casy now. Ain't got the call no more. Got a lot of sinful idears—but they seem kinda sensible.

It's like me, I wouldn' take the good ol' gospel that was just layin' there to my hand. I got to be pickin' at it until I got it all tore down.

You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam.

Oare noi actionam ca urmare a gandirii, sau simtirea este aceea care stimuleaza actiunea, si numai uneori gandirea devine motorul actiunii?

In all such local tragedies time works like a damp brush on water color. The sharp edges blur, the ache goes out of it, the colors melt together, and from the many separated lines a solid gray emerges.

Most lives extend in a curve. There is a rise of ambition, a rounded peak of maturity, a gentle downward slope of disillusion and last a flattened grade of waiting for death.

Her dark eyes made little reflected stars. She was looking at him as she was always looking

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it.

I want to take everything I've seen and thought and learned and reduce them and relate them and refine them until I have something of meaning, something of use. And I can't seem to do it.

Fella can get so he misses the noise of a saw mill

I wonder about people who say they haven't time to think. For myself, I can double think. I find that weighing vegetables, passing the time of day with customers, fighting or loving Mary, coping with the children-- none of these prevents a second and continuing layer of thinking, wondering, conjecturing. Surely this must be true of everyone. Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.

You're bound to get ideas if you go thinking' about stuff.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.