Quotes About Reflection

Sometimes we have to hit bottom before we figure out how to really enjoy life.

Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside. -Gabe Singleton remembering his counselor's first advice-

country highway. He sensed that he was

though we belong to this country as much as this country belongs to us, we only move through its rooms as momentary visitors, projecting our ideas on its walls, that the best we can do is live a good life, perhaps add a couple replicas of ourselves...

or works along its rim with busy fingers like a string of prayer beads.

For between them, ex-husband and wife, some unspoken body of love has been laid to rest, and they stand awkwardly next to it now, regarding it in its coffin.

I'll keep these same photographs pinned to a wall above my desk as tiny parables.

He begins by quoting Thoreau: 'The mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation.

And while his brain kept whirring with the problems of a unified theory, his body became frail and thin, wrinkles fell over him like elephant skin, and began to slouch, as if with each new day he was carrying a slightly heavier pack on his back.

And my parents, whose end I can't imagine. And then, of course, me, the one trying to find a reason for living in the first place.

I can hear beer cans softly pattering down on the pavement, then nothing.

No, if you squinted a little bit, maybe what seemed like wasted time was, in fact, true happiness.

Perhaps we really are surrounded by the past, made prisoners of it. No matter how far we travel, how hard we try to forget, the scarred tree forever stands by the side of the road, if only in our minds. The only way to drive by is to set the past straight, once and for all, by remembering.

Learn to listen to this silence, because it will tell you many things, unimaginable things, things of great beauty and meaning.

Someday, of course, she would light out on her own, following her own riverbed, and though we'd follow as long as she allowed, and though we trusted she'd come and go from our lives with regularity, she would also be a half memory [...]

For these moments in transit, when you ride in the bubble of your own thoughts, without intrusion, moving at sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour, everything becomes color and speed and, for a moment, you outrace your own woes.

I have reached a place in my life where I need to sit down and say, 'Well, what do I do? What's best for me?' I need to look into options for the future.

This is my 20th year in the sport. I've known swimming and that's it. I don't want to swim past age 30 if I continue after this Olympics, and come back in 2016, I'll be 31. I'm looking forward to being able to see the other side of the fence.

Obviously I have this strange animal magnetism. It's very hard to take my eyes off myself.

The best things are never arrived at in haste. God is in no hurry; His plans are never rushed.

I wish it were as easy to stop hating as it was to start.

Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance.

Somehow along my path, I devised a second way of divining God's will for me, which I'm sure isn't original. When I'm not certain what God would have me do, I reframe the question to, "what would love do?" Intellectually, equating God and love seems fair, and it has never led me astray or failed to translate.

I wonder why things always seem most real to us when we lose them, he said softly.