Quotes About Reflection

Not all relationships that end are failures.

Some people are like Slinkies. They aren't really good for anything, but they still bring a smile to my face when I push them down a flight of stairs.

One of the oddest things about being grown-up was looking back at something you thought you knew and finding out the truth of it was completely different from what you had always believed.

In the experience is the emotion. In the emotion is the gift.

I see you've decided to take my advice after all, Richard." Lady Wendall's amused voice said from somewhere above and behind him. "Marrying your ward is *exactly* the sort of usual scandal I had in mind: I wonder it didn't occur to me before.

Humility is as good for the soul as it is for the memory

But the most important thing of all, to which she kept returning like a tongue probing a sore tooth, was the realization that she had fallen in love with her gaurdian.

That was uncomfortable.Am I dead? No such luck

Perfect happiness is good for one's soul. It is wonderful for one's temper. However, in my experience, it tends to impair one's wits.

If you're going to be rude, do it for a reason and get something from it.

Pray to God for guidance and take things one day at a time.

So, get still and listen to the soul. What do you want?

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another! — Anatole France

But this is the slowed-down season held fast by darkness and if no one comes to keep you company then keep watch over your own solitude. In that stillness, you will learn with your whole body the significance of cold and the night, which is otherwise always eluding you. — Patricia Fargnoli, closing lines to "Winter Grace," Winter (Hobblebush Books, 2013)

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

I waste my life. I want to. It's the thing to do with a life. We were wrong about work--it isn't the best thing, no matter how much you love it. Wasting time is better.

We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us ... we are doing the work of memory.

If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.

I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit—that wouldn't be enough—but like a dead man.

I already know (or believe—which comes to the same thing in my Catholic worldview) that daydreaming doesn't make things up. It sees things. Claims things, twirls them around, takes a good look. Possesses them. Embraces them.Makes something of them. Makes sense. Or music. How restful it is, how full of motion. My first paradox.

for myself, the past per se holds little interest, and the present offers only the profound malaise of a culture increasingly devoid of the protocols of self-reflection.

Looking not for "a self," that thing modernity keeps saying we're looking for when that is the last thing we need, choking on our individuality. Looking for his mind.

To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die

This nostalgia, like much nostalgia, was not for something actually experienced and lost, but for a notion held in the fond focus of the imagination.