Quotes About Reflection

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?... Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.

No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.

Popular art is the dream of society it does not examine itself.

We thought we were running away from the grown-ups, and now we're the grown-ups.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

The trouble with education is,' said Jimmy cheerfully, 'that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to reread it later. There's more sense in books, Cicily, than you'd really believe. Though, of course, they don't teach you anything vital that you can't learn for yourself.

The beauty of the past belongs to the past.

The very secret of life for me, I believed, was to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility.

that in former ages they had been as wise as they are in this present, nay, wiser; for, said they, many in this age do think their forefathers have been fools, by which they prove themselves to be such.

That this multitude of pores was the cause of the blackness of the Coal; for, said they, a body that has so many pores, from each of which no light is reflected, must necessarily look black, since black is nothing else but a privation of light, or a want of reflection.

Whose memories are these? Who speaks to her of this gentle time that she is too young to have known herself? There was hardship then, certainly, but not hearts chained and heavy with fear. Who is it that laughs with aged lightheartedness and suggests that this is still a place of promise?

Try to put your happiness before anyone else's, because you may never have done so in your entire life, if you really think about it, if you are really honest with yourself.

Try to love someone who you want to hate, because they are just like you, somewhere inside, in a way you may never expect, in a way that resounds so deeply within you that you cannot believe it.

We must know who we are, so we can know what we want, so we don't end up wanting the wrong thing and get it and realize we don't want it, because by then it is too late.

It is his vegetable ambition never to stir.

One wouldn't want to be responsible for the end, but one might like to be there and know it was all over, the whole bang stupid pointless unnecessarily painful experiment

She has often suspected that her last words to herself and in this world will prove to be 'You bloody old fool' or, perhaps, depending on the mood of the day or the time of the night, 'you fucking idiot'.

For the past is not fixed: it changes as we change, and we look back and perceive in it different messages, different patterns. Our past selves speak to our future selves. We are part of a continuing process.