Quotes About Reflection

My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.

And so i went through the looking glass, stepped into the nether world, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls where death is honour and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.

There are other kinds of damage, to the people in your life, to your sense of who you are and what you can do, to your future

I write constantly, trying to avoid the dull pain of gradual loss, trying not to think about the fact that I am leaving soon.

Self-knowledge is the foundation of a practical spirituality, a spirituality that ripples outward from the self into the world.

We put an extraordinary amount of effort into how we appear, or wish to appear, trying frantically to construct a sense of self out of how we are seen from without. But who are we from within? What makes us who we are? If we stop for a moment and think, Of what do I consist? what is the answer we hear?

You don't just get it, the way you just get a cold; you take it into your head, consider it as an idea first, play with the behaviors awhile, see if they take root.

For all its God language, the Twelve Step program isn't actually an attempt at religious conversion. Really, it just tries to bring us to a place of new spiritual understanding that allows us to live differently in this world.

My most salient memories

You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.

I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.

And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.

This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don't really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you.

The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth.

The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.

For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves.

The great omission in American life is solitude. . . that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incinerator of the spirit.

Pale as the moon I lie in fruitless fantasy.

I don't want to have all the answers, just the right questions.

She gave in to a hankering for a cup of tea even though she knew that the idea of a cup of tea-sitting still, calmly sipping-was more appealing than actually sitting still and trying to calmly sip.

So many people came into your life, and they were such a part of the everyday that it was impossible to imagine them gone until, one day, they were.

Now was not the time to be sentimental. As a child, she'd been ridiculously sentimental about loss, about time passing.

Isn't it strange, Dez, that we never see certain parts of ourselves? Our backs, our lungs, our hearts. We never know what it really is to sit across from ourselves.

Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.