Quotes About Reflection

Although I am a gregarious person, I love solitude even more.

Fools multiply when wise men are silent.

Niente come tornare in un luogo rimasto immutato ci fa scoprire quanto siamo cambiati...

It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.

O mais importante da vida é a marca que deixamos na vida dos outros.

Prison is a still point in a turning world, and it is very easy to remain in the same place in jail while the world moves on.

What struck me so forcefully was how small the planet had become during my decades in prison;

lay a lost and delightful world, the world of my childhood, the world of sweet and irresponsible days at Qunu and Mqhekezweni. Now I was a man, and I would never again play thinti, or steal maize, or drink milk from a cow's udder.

Here I experienced a rather strange sensation. As I was boarding the plane I saw that the pilot was black. I had never seen a black pilot before, and the instant I did I had to quell my panic. How could a black man fly a plane? But a moment later I caught myself: I had fallen into the apartheid mind-set, thinking Africans were inferior and that flying was a white man's job. I sat back in my seat, and chided myself for such thoughts.

As I finally walked through those gates to enter a car on the other side, I felt - even at the age of seventy-one - that my life was beginning anew. My ten thousand days of imprisonment were over.

Although it was not published while I was in prison, it forms the spine of this memoir.

I have retired, but if there is anything that would kill me it is to wake up in the morning not knowing what to do.

assumia, em casa, no ônibus, no escritório, um ar de estátua no próprio monumento.

Every year for New Years I write down all of my goals and dreams and put them in my Bible. At the end of the year I go and pull the paper out and check this off and check that off.

Tout à coup je pensai à l'image vaine qui m'avait égaré si longtemps. « Sylvie, dis-je, arrêtons-nous ici, le voulez-vous ? » Je me jetai à ses pieds ; je confessai en pleurant à chaudes larmes mes irrésolutions, mes caprices ; j'évoquai le spectre funeste qui traversait ma vie. « Sauvez-moi ! ajoutai-je, je reviens à vous pour toujours. » Elle tourna vers moi ses regards attendris…

the whole point of worship is focusing on God—who He is, what He's done. Once I put my focus on the right person, I forget about myself.

A woman of strength knows to take the time to prepare herself...she goes into seclusion for a season if necessary, to gather the strength of God's power to perform what he requires.

By the time they reached the Queens Highway turnoff, Anna found she liked Sheila more in memoriam that she would've guessed.

what we have done is unacceptable.

the kind of life-fatigue she occasionally glimpses in the eyes of the very, very old.

Though she knew she was not personally responsible for the collective sins of the world, she couldn't shake a creeping shame for enslaving Africans, decimating the American Indian tribes, annihilating the passenger pigeon, building strip malls on California's beaches and leaving behind unsightly junk on the face of the moon. Clintus

Anna'd been born female, she'd grown into a small woman and, in the past ten years, had slid into middle age. If ever there was a cloak of invisibility, time and circumstances were trying to weave her one.

Since joining the National Park Service fourteen years ago, Anna had worked every Fourth of July. ... Winding her way through the masses, trying not to get her fragile frame jostled, she realized she preferred it that way. Working on holidays, one wasn't required to have fun. There was no pressure, no disappointments. And she usually had a wonderful time.

buildings ravaged by the violence of those who lived there, reflecting it back on the residents. Homes of people too mentally ill to care for themselves or their property.