Quotes About Reflection

He was not analytical enough yet to have discovered that there are certain loves, and certain phases of love, which bring perfect happiness only in their pauses and intervals, as water grows clear when one's progress has ceased to stir it.

Todavía no era lo suficientemente analítico para darse cuenta de que hay ciertos amores, y ciertas fases del amor, que solo producen la felicidad perfecta en sus pausas e intervalos, igual que el agua se vuelve cristalina cuando el avance de uno deja de removerla.

Her estimate of human nature, and more particularly of her own sex, went up as the coffee went down.

Often in those two months I said to myself, If I live, I will wipe this time from my mind; I cannot even bear the memory. Yet now I turn to it. He is gone; and all times when he was there seem like lost riches.

But sometimes his face would change, as if sorrow touched his shoulder, saying, "Had you forgotten me?

We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.

In hatred is love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.

Nothing will change, Alexias. No, that is false; there is change whenever there is life, and already we are not the two who met in Taureas' palaestra. But what kind of fool would plant an apple-slip, to cut it down at the season when the fruit is setting? Flowers you can get every year, but only with time the tree that shades your doorway and grows into the house with each year's sun and rain.

Wisdom comes with age, but keep it to yourself.

The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.

Death. It doesn't have to be boring.

Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone. They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.

I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.

We broke up for the night about eleven. Mrs. Butler had come down for a while, and had even played a little, something of Tschaikovsky's, a singing, plaintive theme that brought sadness back into Margery's face, and made me think, for no reason, of a wet country road and a plodding, back-burdened peasant.

I like to read because it kills me.

In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again,

I study nature so as not to do foolish things.

Something unpronounceable followed by a long silence points out my life is becoming a landscape.

I do not think I really have anything to say about poetry other than remarking that it is a wandering little drift of unidentified sound, and trying to say more reminds me of following the sound of a thrush into the woods on a summer's eve - if you persist in following the thrush it will only recede deeper and deeper into the woods; you will never actually see the thrush (the hermit thrush is especially shy), but I suppose listening is a kind of knowledge, or as close as one can come." (viii)

It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it's what a poem does with its eyes.

If there is any irreverence in my own work, I hope it is the irreverence I bear in mistrusting my own sincere self, which then sincerely mistrusts the irreverent me. If there is a bottom to this, I think it is a life's work.

I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, 'I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say'; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.

In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

Stali?my naprzeciwko siebie, zapatrzeni jak wtedy, gdy niespodziewanie spotyka si? jelenia - oboje zastygacie na chwil?, równie zaskoczeni, i to spojrzenie zdaje si? by? pojedynczym, jakby obie strony mia?y te same oczy.