Quotes About Reflection

To be anorexic...she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could understand that now for, maybe underneath that desquamated self you would locate a new version.

Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah's age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life.

Is there anything sadder than the scrawniest little piece of uneaten chicken at a dinner party?" "Hmm," said Jules. "Yes. The Holocaust.

The past is so tenacious.

Sometimes it's easier to tell ourselves a story.

sometimes a mindfuck was a satisfying and productive fuck after all.

We had a good marriage," he said. "I just thought it would be so much longer." Then he shrugged, and coughed away a sob, this thin man in his sixties with the soft androgynous face that aging seemed to bring, as though all the hormones were finally mixed up in a big coed pot because it just didn't matter anymore.

Because as you get older, life sort of eats away at you like battery acid, and all the things you once loved are suddenly harder to find. And when you do find them, you don't have time to enjoy them anymore, you know?

Standing in the heat and noise, facing the rows of bent heads, Ethan Figman willed himself to leave that long sleep in which you dream that the inhuman things that people do to one another on a distant continent have nothing to do with the likes of you.

But the loss of possibilities was always undeniably painful.

But maybe in life, she thought later, there are not only moments of strangeness but moments of knowledge, which don't appear at the time as knowledge at all

Everything you do, it'll all feel really slow for a long time. But looking back, much later, it will have seemed like it was fast.

Jules listened to this soliloquy in grim silence; she hardly knew what to say. Ash was describing an enclosed world that Jules too had been given a chance to enter, but hadn't wanted to. She still didn't want to, but the descriptions of the closeness and intensity of that world only increased her loneliness. "Go on," was all she said.

It was impossible to look out on the city from high up without thinking for a second of 9/11, even nine years later. Any overarching view of the city seemed to call for a brief, noble hush. Smokestacks steamed; lights stuttered; there was movement along the grid. The quiet moment now wasn't unpleasurable. It was just a moment of seriousness, born in something terrible, but now uncoupled from it.

There were moments when you idly glanced into the toilet or into a tissue after you'd used it, and suddenly remembered that this, this was what you carried around inside you all the time. This was what was always waiting to be let out.

Now she felt as if she were dully humming with an unpleasant, low-grade drunkenness.

I'd looked and looked at him for so long; I'd made a habit of it, a vocation, and I could stop looking now.

mostly they had to take pleasure in the moments that no one else would ever witness.

I think how easy it would be to go through life as a goat. You don't have any problems. You don't fall in love, so you don't get crushed by loss. You just have your simple, farm-animal life, which I envy now.

What if she'd turned down the lightly flung invitation and went about her life, thudding obliviously along like a drunk person, a blind person, a moron, someone who thinks that the small packet of happiness she carries is enough.

Those moments of strangeness. Life is full of them.

People rarely spoke of a breakup as tragic; instead, breakups were part of life. But when you and the other person broke up, you could look for them everywhere, and maybe you would physically find them, but even if they were the same person, they were not for you; they were not yours. The evaporation of love was like a kind of death.

It's weird," she said, "the way sometimes you're in your life, but other times you're looking back at it like a spectator. It kind of goes back and forth, back and forth." "And then you die." She laughed a little. "Yes. And then you die.

Books light the fire - whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.