Quotes About Reflection

What you learn when you are ill, about what hurts, can then be applied to the better times, too. Pain is one hell of a teacher.

Do you ever think 'how did I end up here?' Like you are in a maze and totally lost and it's all your fault because you were the one who made every turn?

It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

There are as many versions of a book as there are readers.

She is smiling at me. It is a wistful smile. The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty. The kind that contains sadness and defiance and amusement all at once.

Yes, there had been a void inside me, but voids were underrated. Voids were empty of love but also pain. Emptiness was not without its advantages. You could move around in emptiness.

Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state.

There is no point spending an entire life trying to win the love you didn't feel when you needed it. You sometimes just have to let go of an old story and start your own. Give yourself some love. You can't change the past. You can't change other people. You can change you though. You narrate this story. So start to write a new chapter.

Two mirrors, opposite and facing each other at perfectly parallel angles, viewing themselves through the other, the view as deep as infinity... Love was a way to live forever in a single moment, and it was also a way to see yourself as you had never actually seen yourself, and made you realise – having done so – that this view was a more meaningful one than any of your previous self-perceptions and self-deceptions.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping... Rather than leave the mind entirely, words help us leave a mind, and give us the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one but with firmer foundations, and very often a better view.

in a world trying to increasingly isolate us from our environment and our true selves, books are our route to freedom, and to each other'.

the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective.

Can I ask you something?" asks Will, after a while. The man sips his whisky instead of answering. Will asks the question anyway. "Have you ever been in love?" The man places his glass down and stares at Will, steel-eyed. The expected reaction, "Once," he responds , the word just a croak from the back of his throat. Will nods. "It's always just once, isn't it? The rest..they're just echoes

The hardest bit about losing people you loved wasn`t thinking about the memories you had, the ones that had already been made. No. The hardest bit was the stuff that should have been, but had now been denied.

the main lesson of history is humans don't learn from history.

I stared at the tweet I was about to post. It wasn't going to add anything to my life. Or anyone else's life. It was just going to lead to more checking of my phone, like Pepys with his pocket watch. I pressed delete, and felt a strange relief as I watch each letter disappear.

The way out is never through yourself.

It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don't live.

People are craving not just physical space but the space to be mentally free. A space from unwanted distracted thoughts that clutter our heads like pop-up advertising of the mind in an already frantic world. And that space is still there to be found. It's just that we can't rely on it. We have to consciously seek it out.

I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough.

She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn't reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.

I want to know if one of the reasons I sometimes feel like I am on the brink of a breakdown is partly because the world sometimes seems on the brink of a breakdown.

Be kind to yourself.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping. It is not where we are, but where we want to go, and all that. "Is there no way out of the mind?" Sylvia Plath famously asked.