Quotes About Reflection

But all the heart break of her heroins had not prepared her for her own.

And then I walked out, straight through the twilight, treading the beaten earth. There were no dust clouds, no signs of anyone, but I paid no mind. I was my own lucky hand of solitaire. The desert landscape unchanging: a long, unwinding scroll that I would one day amuse myself by filling. I'm going to remember everything and then I'm going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café. That's what I was thinking, in my dream, looking down at my hands.

Spanish pilgrims travel on Camino de Santiago from monastery to monastery, collecting small medals to attach to their rosary as proof of their steps. I have stacks of Polaroids, each marking my own, that I sometimes spread out like tarots or baseball cards of an imagined celestial team.

Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book.

I clawed through a thick web of the culture's consciousness that I hadn't known existed.

The other afternoon, when you fell asleep on my shoulder, I drifted off, too. But before I did, it occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.

Christmas was coming and there was a pervasive melancholy, as if everyone simultaneously remembered they had nowhere to go. Even

Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. —This is how I live, I am thinking.

In his heartlessness he had ignored nature, and how heartless nature was in return.

Mommy, I said aloud, and I thought of her suddenly stopping what she was doing, often in the center of the kitchen, and invoking her own mother whom she lost when she was eleven years old. How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they're gone?

Thank you, I said. I have lived in my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards.

I have smoothed the hem of the robe of Parsifal. Watched Giotto's sheep wander from a fresco. Prayed before holy icons unveiled, surviving time. Held shavings swept from the hut of Geppetto. Unzipped a body bag and beheld the face of my brother. Witnessed the acolyte scatter petals over a dying poet. I saw the smoke of incense form the shape of my days. I saw my love return to God. I saw things as they are.

It occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.

I revisit my book piles. Trying not to be sidetracked or lured into another dimension.

Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.

I got some coffee and stood looking at the sky.

Hey, sister. What's your situation?" "On earth or in the universe?" p.27

Beneath the feet of Christ was a skull embellished with the words memento mori. "It means 'Remember we are mortal,' " said Gregory, "but poetry is not." I just nodded. (p. 155)

I should get out of here, I am thinking, out of the city. But where would I go that I would not drag my seemingly incurable lethargy along with me,

It was then that I experienced the weight of sin, even a sin as small as a skater pin. I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection.

I loved my coat and the cafe and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity.

Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory. — Patti Smith, M Train (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Ich war zu neugierig auf die Zukunft, um zurückzuschauen.