Quotes About Reflection

The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough.

The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated or more articulate... The best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an "alienated majesty

What Proust is describing is an act of self-discovery on the part of his reader. Immersing herself in Proust, the reader may encounter aspects of herself that, while they have perhaps been in existence for a long time, have remained unnamed, undescribed, and therefore in a certain sense unknown. One might say that the reader learns the language of herself

In later life most good things happen very slowly; only bad things tend to happen fast.

Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we ourselves possess.

Language, a great poem in and of itself, is all around us. We live in the lap of enormous wonder, but how rarely do most of us look up and smile in gratitude and pleasure?

The thinker has much to contend with—the home, marriage, his own body, convention, books, the weight of past reflection, and loneliness. But sometimes he is compelled to contend with something more: not just the indifference or even the mild disdain of the crowd, but its actual hostility. In Western religion the death of Jesus is central; in the heroic tradition, the death of Achilles; in philosophy, much revolves around the judicial murder of Socrates.

Reading is life's grand second chance.

We need to learn not simply to read books but to allow ourselves to be read by them.

I went to the Protestant cemetery, and it sounds really morbid, but when I came here, I thought that this is where I want to die. I feel spiritually found here.

Meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using the ego to observe and tame its own manifestations.

Stillness does not mean the elimination of disturbances as much as a different way of viewing them.

Remember the motto: 'Work hard, play hard.' Regard your personal time as just as important as your work time and give as much attention to planning it as you do to planning your work. What are you working for if you don't have a personal life?

What else are our lives but a story we tell ourselves to find some sense in the pain ofliving?

WILL'S RULES FOR LIVING #5: HEALING TAKES MUCH LONGER THAN YOU THINK. THE BIGGEST SCARS YOU CARRY AREN'T THE ONES YOU CAN SEE.

Storytellers don't run out of stories, they just run out of time.

WILL'S RULES FOR LIVING #7: SOMETIMES, IN ORDER TO GET COMPLETELY SANE, YOU HAVE TO GO A LITTLE CRAZY.

We all want answers to the big questions.

Words lose their meaning when you look at them too long. 'God.' 'Science.' Meaning.

Good literature is a mirror through which we see ourselves more clearly.

Something worth loving. But she could not love him as long as she hated herself. Her past wouldn't allow it.

He ran west, away from the rising sun. The wet sand glistened in the morning light and felt spongy beneath his shoes. The tide was out, and the beach sat wide, filled with a fresh assortment of seashells and sand crabs scurrying sideways and jellyfish stranded out of water. Seagulls picked over dead fish, and a pelican stood witness. The wind was down, the sea smooth, and the waves low swells instead of whitecaps. The air was fresh, and the beach was his.

shakes alone." Nick

One absolutely crucial element in moving your brain from panic to logic is to put words to what you're feeling at each stage.