Quotes About Reflection

Hagas lo que hagas te arrepentiras.

He also told me he'd just written the epitaph for his tomb: LO PEOR YA PASO. PEOR HUMILLACION QUE LA DE EXISTIR NO HAY. THE WORST IS BEHIND. THERE IS NO HUMILIATION WORSE THAN EXISTENCE

Si he de conceder crédito a lo dicho por la gente que trajo la noticia debo creer, sin vacilar un punto, que murió con mi nombre en las pupilas

Maybe I don't want it to pass because that would mean an acceptance that life is like this: just a gradual process of loss.

Thursday is perhaps the worst day of the week. It's nothing in itself; it just reminds you that the week has been going on too long.

It's what the loss uncovers in you that brings on despair, not the loss itself.

It was the most silent, beautiful city I had ever been in, and I found myself wishing, once or twice, that I was here alone, not worrying about our relationship, not having to make an effort. I would have walked and walked along the deserted paths, not speaking, storing everything up. I wouldn't have minded the rain.

Perhaps because smoking can be a way of getting through the time, when you don't know how to endure things," said Frieda. "For a few minutes, that's what you're doing: you're smoking a cigarette.

Oh, happiness," said Frieda. "That's not what this is about.

Nobody tells you, when you're young, what it will be like." "What is it like?" "You become like a ghost in your own life.

How do you measure absence? There had been minutes that had become hours, and hours that had been like a desert with no horizon. There had been days dull and deadened as lead, and whole weeks when she'd had to force herself forward, inch by inch, across their expanse. How do you know when your heart is ready once more?

Frieda smiled. "It's lesson number one in therapist school," she said. "It's the way of avoiding being put on the spot. So that whatever your patient says to you, you just say, 'What do you mean by that?' And then you're off the hook.

He was forty-two, after all. This was just the age when men went off the rails, drank and bought motorbikes and had affairs, trying to be young again. But he didn't want a motorbike and he didn't want an affair. He didn't want to be young again. All that awkwardness and pain, that sense of being in the wrong life.

No hace falta estar familiarizado con la muerte para reconocerla.

The muted November light made everything seem gray and still, like a pencil drawing.

In her scorching memoir, Keeper, about the two years she lived with her mother-in-law and her rapidly worsening Alzheimer's disease, Andrea Gillies asks, 'What it is that dementia takes away?' And she answers herself: 'Everything; every last thing we reassure ourselves that nothing could take away from us.

To want to die rather than be dependent and helpless; to try to kill the person you love the most because their future seems mere torment: what does this say about our culture?

During dementia's end-game, a person goes to a place where we cannot follow them and can barely guess at. The bursts of lucidity that those with catastrophic memory loss can sometimes have are like bright, sharp flashes of lightning over a blasted landscape.

There are days when the younger self accuses you. Is this who you wanted to be? Is this the life you wanted to live? What had happened to the books she had dreamt of writing, the journeys she had planned to take, the person she had thought to become? What had happened to that quiet, stubborn, fierce girl who promised herself freedom and adventure and who thought she could do anything?

In the end you have to choose who you will become. You are your life's work. Every moment of every day makes you. Only at the end, when your story is over, do you know what you have created.

It's like she's the living dead,' says Pauline. 'A long time ago, I lost her. I talk, and there's no reaction. Sometimes, when she laughs, or something in the tone of her voice - then I recognise the way we were twenty years ago. You fill in the gaps and the memories. Then she leaves again. You say goodbye all the time.

En toch dwaalde ze al die tijd in gedachten door de kathedralen van het bos, in die nog altijd witte wereld waar de uilen krasten in het donker en een vriend op sterven lag.

You're supposed to gain things as you grow older in return for the things that you lose. But what had she gained? Dignity? She hadn't got that. Peace? No. Wisdom? It seemed unlikely. And what had she lost? Beauty, youth, innocence, possibility. Your past grows longer and your future shrinks. And you lose your parents and your children – often at the same time so that you go from being daughter and mother to being neither. What are you then?

Le cose, una volta pensate, che bisogno c'è di dirle?