Quotes About Reflection

Maybe the dead are gods, there's certainly something kind about them, the way they give you room. What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand. The more dead you know it seems the more living there are you don't know.

She stands by the edge of the bed, baggy in nakedness, and goes off into the bathroom to do her duty. There's that in women repels him: handle themselves like an old envelope. Tubes into tubes, wash away men's dirt—insulting, really. Faucets cry. The more awake he gets the more depressed he is. From deep in the pillow he stares at the horizontal strip of stained-glass church window that shows beneath the window shade. Its childish brightness comes from years away.

The thought of these people having the bold idea of leaving their homes to come here and pray pleases and reassures Rabbit, and moves him to close his own eyes and bow his head with a movement so tiny that Ruth won't notice. Help me, Christ. Forgive me. Take me down the way. Bless Ruth, Janice, Nelson, my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Springer, and the unborn baby. Forgive Tothero and all the others. Amen.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

Harry sits wordless staring through the windshield, rigid in body, rigid in spirit. The curving highway seems a wide straight road that has opened up in front of him. There is nothing he wants to do but go down it.

Sweetie, the bluebird has flown. We're too young to sit around the rest of our lives waiting for it to fly back in the window. It won't. It can't fly backwards.' He was using his hands again in that disagreeable stagey way, and Ruth was angered by the flicker of conceit in his expression when he struck upon the image of the bluebird fying backwards - a piece of animation on the screen of his face.

The most terrifying and important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation," he explained. "A human being is a very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself—who is he really?

Our inner self learns from the things that our outer self suffers, and though it appears devastating to the outer self, the inner self lives on forever with the wisdom gained.

It's funny, I don't feel any older than I did when I was twenty. But I know I am, because recently some twenty-year-old called me 'sir.' Sometimes the only way you know you are getting older is by the way others treat you.

Change your present perspective and change what you think and do, and you can change your future. You are not a slave to your past. Your present situation may be the result of the decisions you made in your past, but your future will be the result of the decisions you make now.

I fish because I love to . . . because I love the environs where trout are found . . . because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don't want to waste the trip . . . and, finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant––and not nearly so much fun.

not simply cause-and-effect thinking or group comparison thinking but the complexity of human life.

education (Tesch, 1988; van Manen, 1990, 2014).

Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own.

And finally, count your blessings. You got through college. You didn't commit suicide, O.D., or have a nervous breakdown, and let's remember the ones who did. It's time to get busy. It's your turn to cause trouble.

You should never read just for enjoyment. Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own.

I stand there sipping and savoring for over ten minutes, thinking of the man I read about who weighed six hundred pounds from drinking vast amounts of tap water.

I was trying to have an insight, and all I could think of was that I'd backed myself into a corner, and the corner was me.

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.

He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.

One does not deceive oneself about the consequences of one's acts; one deceives oneself about the ease with which one can live with those consequences.

Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.

The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.