Quotes About Reflection

It is a dolorous fact that a meal, months in the dreaming, weeks in the planning and days in the preparation, is eaten in minutes.

there's something undoing about the dying light of mid-afternoon.

Window panes that rattled under the lash of the wind for two months on end, rain that leaked beneath the doors, her husband out and drinking, electricity cut off and the radio shut down, the boredom, the quiet and incredible loneliness - Margaret Looney would remember when she first discovered love and wonder at how immense it must have been to be lasting so long.

was already different because I was a twin. Funny how you can say that: I am a twin. Not I am one of twins, but I actually am A Twin. Like there's two of me all the time, this other one right here beside me whether you can see him or not. Or as if you're saying, I'm a Half.

You've still time to go back and right all the mistakes you've made.

Beside the river there are two things you never forget, that the moment you look at a river that moment has already passed, and that everything is on its way somewhere else.

Pieces of story she would discover intact in her. She would draw them into the air with a single phrase and be elsewhere for a moment, eyes distant and eyelashes winging as an image fleeted past. Christy would gently try and bring forth more, but like a fallen chandelier inside her the whole was shattered and beyond repair and there were only exquisite shards.

Briefly everything was stopped, as if a hand had reached out and paused the world in its turning. She stood by the cooker now watching him, the pale blueberries of her eyes, watching him with pride, her two hands brought up to her mouth the way she always did when she had feelings two large for words.

I lay blinking in the chastened light as the world condensed to two certainties, one, the jelly of my brain had swollen too large for my skull, the other, I would never again drink alcohol.

This is my father's story. I am writing it to find him. But to get where you're going, you have to first go backwards. That's directions in Ireland, it's also T.S. Eliot.

The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God.

And in just this way the days after my father's death became weeks became months in the familiar ceaseless cruelty of time, carrying us ever forward even when we sit still. Time does not pass, pain grows." (p.223)

feel the sun striking down and know something of the peace of that pause, the dawning that opens in a person, which is not yet at the point of understanding, not yet anything solid or sure as a thought, but happens in a way that you may not realise until years later and miles away when it comes to you that just then, just there, you were brushed with nothing less than eternity, catching a sense of a place that has been before you and will be after you, and both were contained in that moment.

dangles of rosary beads moving through fingers like some circular riverworks of soul. The Men's Aisle didn't fill until

reasons too deep to be fished.

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

The truth is, like all places in the past, it cannot be found any longer.

After a liquid lunch in Craven's, he had found the margins of the roads badly drawn.

Again, fix the outsides and maybe my insides won't be such a dark place.

Everything is working out, he keeps saying. For the first time, I'm not so sure. I think back to my life sober - working, getting up early to go on bike rides and shit, going to movies. I haven't looked at a newspaper in over two weeks. There could be a new war going on and I'd have no idea. But this is the life I want to live, right? I mean, I'm happier.

And I have this, for now. I just wish I could figure out how to keep my fucking mind from going all over the place - dwelling on all the loss and pain and everything I'VE DONE - then jumping off into the future to how impossible it all seems.

The world's turning a whole lot faster than it should be.

John Lennon says that "living is easy with eyes closed." I want to close my eyes. I want to close my eyes so badly.

It was that simple. I just forgot for a second how bad things had been. A disease of amnesia, right?