Quotes About Reflection

Those early days in Paris were nearly forty years behind him and yet, in the final pages he writes of Hadley, "I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.

Let's just say I've developed a theory that only the vanished truly leave their mark. And I still don't feel I've sorted it out. Maybe we never do survive our families.

I don't know how to describe it, but after the blush of my own company wore off, I became so aware of Earnest's absence it was as if the lack of him had moved into the apartment with me.

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual- if one things about it, it's really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn't think things through.

I can't see how I'll make it a year this way," he said. "It seems impossible, I know. But when we're old and doddering, this year will seem like a blink.

Whatever they were, they were living their lives, out there doing it, making their mistakes. Somehow I'd gotten stuck along the way […] and I didn't know how to free myself exactly.

There was nowhere to go in the house to escape my dark thoughts.

You know, we don't always understand what we're living inside of, or how it will matter. We can guess all we want and prepare, too, but we never know how it's going to turn out.

Do you think we can ever leave the past behind?' he said. 'I don't know. I hope so.

In the same way that fish had quickness, cats had a way of being still. That was their gift, and you could learn a lot by watching them get there.

You've done it now, haven't you? It's too late to take anything back and you wouldn't anyway. You need to remember that later, when you see your wife and want to die for hurting her. Remember no one made you do anything. It's never anyone but you who does anything, and for that reason alone you shouldn't be sorry

There's so much to lose." "There always is," she said. I sighed and reached for another biscuit. "Are you always this wise, Ruth?" "Only when it comes to other people's lives.

What are you thinking? Just of how much you've changed me. This is why there is poetry. For days like these.

you looked at the bicycles one way, they looked very solid, like sculpture, with afternoon light glinting cleanly off the chrome handlebars—one, two, three, all in a row. If you looked at them another way, you could see just how thin each kickstand was under the weight of the heavy frame, and how they were poised to fall like dominoes or the skeletons of elephants or like love itself.

Maybe we are always all of our ages at once, like nesting matryoshka dolls?

My father died when I was young. We all thought it was rather fortunate at first. It simplified all sorts of things. But over time…well. Let's just say I've developed a theory that only the vanished truly leave their mark. And I still don't feel I've sorted it out. Maybe we never do survive our families.

But what does it all add up to? What is all the suffering for if not so we can see how alike we are, and not alone? Where will the mercy come from, if not from us?

I'd had my share of rain. My mother's illness ... had weighed on me, but the years before had been heavy, too. I was only twenty eight.

What am I meant for then?" "How wonderful that question is, Beru." He smiled mysteriously. "And as you did not die on this day, you have more time in which to answer it.

I also liked to look around at the houses surrounding the park and wonder about the people who filled them, what kinds of marriages they had and how they loved or hurt each other on any given day, and if they were happy, and whether they thought happiness was a sustainable thing.

I'm hoping it gets easier at some point," I told him. "I still feel awful about the things we said. The things we didn't say. Do you think it's possible to make peace with the past?" "Hell. You can try, I guess. But I'm not sure anyone gets forgiven. Not even then.

But I'm not sure I believe in wars anymore. They only make ghosts and they don't change anything.

How personal this life was, and how every time we grazed against one another even for a moment, we weren't the same afterward.

Because it's not always easy to know how to live.