Quotes About Reflection

I try to become more humble and more myself with every year. There was a while when I got famous where I was so confused and my head was spinning.

It's sad and beautiful how a few hours can come to stand for the many others that never were. One looks back and holds up a handful of hours to prove, "That was what it was, it was so perfect," in spite of what one knows, in spite of all the other days that came before and after.

Ya no me sentía completa. Pero entonces me di cuenta con gran pesar de que en el fondo nunca me había sentido completa. Y esa atroz reflexión me detuvo en seco. Era joven, tanto que de alguna manera era culpa mía que estuviese incompleta, pensé. No sabía que todo el mundo se siente así, que la parte esencial del desarrollo de las personas consiste en detectar cuáles son nuestros espacios vacíos y aprender a llenarlos uno mismo.

Is it terrible to take solace in finding oneself better off than the huddled masses?

Water was a strange substance, like memory - much to push against, but nothing solid to hang on to.

Death doesn't frighten me, except to make me feel that life is ephemeral.

It was a real whale, a photograph of a real whale. I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall, like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly.

Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone.

He's stuck at 3:14 a.m. with only the moon to talk to.

And why had Deb's last boyfriend dumped her? I dumped him. Maybe you didn't French-kiss him enough. I promise you that wasn't it. Tell me how many times a day you kissed, and I'll say if it was enough. Four hundred. Not enough.

Two plus three is five, check the email, one plus seven is, check the email, eight, check the email, which comes to a total of, who the hell am I anyway, eighty five. This is how he dismembers his day, in the most painful way, moment by moment. A bigger man would just shoot it, put it out of its misery.

Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them.

After passionately nursing this idea for about an hour, I suddenly had another idea: no I wouldn't. Of course I wouldn't make an entire city out of cereal boxes in the basement. The moment I had this second thought, I knew this was the real one.

I went to work the next day out of curiosity, as people return to their villages after the war to see what is left.

I would always be earthbound; he hadn't robbed me of my ability to fly or to live forever. I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?

That is my problem with life, I rush through it, like I'm being chased.

We grew still and stared at each other. It seemed incredibly dangerous to look into each other's eyes, but we were doing it. For how long can you behold another person? Before you have to think of yourself again, like dipping the brush back in for more ink. For a very long time, you didn't need to get more ink, there was no reason to get anything else, because she was as good as me, she lived on earth like me, she suffered as I did.

I was still feeling the old loss, just in a new way.

So this was what it was like not to be me.

At its best, my system gives me a smoother living experience. My days become dreamlike, no edges anywhere, none of the snags and snafus that life is so famous for. After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can't even feel myself anymore, it's as if I don't exist.

I wondered how many other things had flown past me into death. Perhaps many. Perhaps I was flying past them, like the grim reaper, signaling the end. This would explain so much.

Where did they go, those things we did?

I felt like I wasn't living thoroughly enough — I was distracted in ways I wouldn't be if I'd been born in 1929.

I had written the same word seven thousand times attempting to alchemize time.