Quotes About Reflection

Prayer is the hardest thing. And no one congratulates you for doing it because no one knows you're doing it, and if things turn out well they likely won't thank God in any case. But I have a feeling that the hardest thing is what we all better be doing now, and that it's not only the best answer but the only one.

Identify, I've learned, can be sliced many ways and there is gain with every loss.

grieving is the beginning of your self discovery

Where did the time go? Yesterday, I was a girl, and today, I suddenly find myself in the autumn of my years with the cold winds of winter breathing down my neck.

Matt found that endearing. And disturbing in ways he didn't want to acknowledge.

Dead indeed is the heart from which the balmy air of the sea cannot banish sorrow and grief.

To know what we think, to be masters of our own meaning, will make a solid foundation for great and weighty thought.

If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it's fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there's an arrow in your heart...

We don't set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people's hearts.

I have stepped off the relationship scene to come to terms with myself. I have spent most of my adult life being 'someone's girlfriend', and now I am happy being single.

Charlotte looked up doubtfully, wondering why, as she got older, she seemed to be more afraid of things, not less.

Charlotte believed in ghosts, for after all, she had been a kind of ghost herself.

Florence had noticed one or two eccentricities in herself lately, which might be the result of hard work, or of age, or of living alone. When the letters came, for example, she often found herself wasting time in looking at the postmarks and wondering whoever they could be from, instead of opening them in a sensible manner and finding out at once.

Old age is not the same thing as historical interest,' he said. 'Otherwise we should both of us be more interesting than we are.

I've grown old with this century; there's not much left of either of us.

But her thoughts are often of the past. That evanescent, pervasive, slippery internal landscape known to no one else, that vast accretion of data on which you depend - without it you would not be yourself. Impossible to share and no one else could view it anyway. The past is out ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

And now I want to get yesterday down while I still have the awful taste of it

The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.

And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.

I began drinking because the thought that I was drinking gave me a kind of identity: each time I poured myself a brandy in the deserted afternoon I could say to myself 'I am a woman who drinks.

For one's past grows to a point where it is longer than one's future, and then it can become too great a burden.

I was alone with myself, and we watched each other with steady, cold, inward eyes: the past and its consequence, the reality and its insubordinate dream.