Quotes About Reflection

Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.

the past is only the future with the lights on.

At a certain age [...] you start thinking you might have learned something when you were young if you hadn't already been so smart.

it's usually a bad one, a negative thought, but we have

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television'.

Sometimes you're the windshield; sometimes you're the bug.

ENEMIES OFTEN become mirror images of each other.

No benign deity plucks television news show hosts from their desks in the prime of life and then hastily compensates their friends and family by displays of irradiated droplets in the sky.

I spent the next couple of hours either walking around with a gelato in my hand or on my knees in church asking to be forgiven for the sin of gluttony.

Abu-Jamal, serving a life-sentence now in the Pennsylvania prison, after over 29 years on death row, observes this about prison time: "Once loving relationships wither into yesterday's dust. Relatives die, their loss mourned in silent loneliness. Times, temperaments, mores change, and the caged move to outdated rhythms.

Yet there is a still more crucial transformation of time: it becomes an agent that does things to the one passing through it. Many a prisoner will give voice to this idea by saying, "You don't do time; time does you.

Time in prison—not just in solitary—becomes "a thick dull mallet that pounds consciousness into a coma.

Hindsight's perfect vision is seldom clouded by context

There is something unspeakably consoling in one's own smile. In that reflection, you can discern the face of yourself as a child and the face of yourself as a corpse. And in this moment, all the fundamental antinomies are reconciled--the sacred and the profane, the analyst and the analysand, the celebrated success and the abject failure. The pilot and the passenger. Writer and reader. Fiction and nonfiction. Past and present. And the mind that abides and the mind that is gone.

Whatever it takes to break your heart and wake you up is grace.

Solitude is different from loneliness. Solitude is rich, inspiring, and restful; replete with space and possibility. Loneliness is empty, pathetic, and enervating; bereft of power and potential. Lonely people expect others to fill their inner void, whereas lovers of solitude—which is what I invite you to become on this journey—recognize that time alone is precious, a refuge where you can practice meeting yourself in the mirror of the blank page.

Always question. Always analyze. But in the end, suspend judgment until you've been there. Live it to learn it.

Like many of those who document history, he also curated the images of the past he left behind.

Like most people my age, I merely existed.

El pasado duele solo si dejamos que nos alcance

You need to think of your quest for wisdom as a hunger that will never be satiated. The mere thought that you've arrived will spawn pride and arrogance.

Solitude and loneliness are two separate things. One you choose out of wisdom, the other out of necessity." -Mark Miller

To see your-self you must first be yourself, to be your-self you must first know yourself, and to know your-self you must first love your-self more than anything in the world."-Mark Miller

I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky." (p.275)