Quotes About Reflection

I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.

There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That's where we're at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water.

He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.

He heard a loon call, piercing and forlorn, and it poured into his spirit like cool water. It was a sad cry and he realized as he listened how barren the river had felt in the days without it. Why was a wail that seemed so lost and lonely so…what? Essential and lovely.

Because that's what it turned into: in front of a fine painting a viewer stopped looking and started watching, watching is more specific, watching is a hunt for something, a search, the way we search for a loved one's boat on the horizon, or an elk in the trees. Before a good painting they started watching for clues to their own life.

Never know how you feel about someone until they die and come back.

So crows must spend a lot of the day wondering what they are supposed to do now, what they are here for, and that seemed like a cruel existential dilemma for anyone who didn't have TV.

There was something satisfying in a cessation of paddling on smooth water. It was like watching a flock of ducks all stop beating at once and sail over a bank of trees on extended wings.

She also confessed that in an odd way she was happier here than she'd ever been. Even with all the loss. Happier being whatever that was. Than waiting.

One of the things that happens to people as they get older, and especially to women on the other side of middle age, is that people forget to notice.

Missing what most of the time? The babbling faceless agora, the fame, the parties, the pop of flash bulbs? The lovers, the gaiety, the champagne? The solitude carved out of celebrity, poring over charts by a single lamp on a wide desk in a venerable hotel? Room service, coffee before dawn? The company of one friend, two? The choice: All of it or not? Some or none? Now, not now, maybe later?

If one concentrated on one thing and then another—the good things in each moment—the fear wrapped deep in the gut seemed to unswell, like an iced bruise. Still there, but quieter.

Ich schließe meine Augen. Was da drinnen los ist. Was da zappelt, was da wie ein blinder Fisch durch den Schmerz schwimmt, für immer und ewig. Was da lebt, was bleibt. Was sich erneuert, die Liebe und den Schmerz lebendig hält. Die Liebe ist das Flussbett, das sich mit Schmerz füllt. Es füllt sich jeden Tag aufs Neue mit Tränen.

The sadness of our world, it underlies everything like a water.

he thought he could sit on this deck and watch that stream for the rest of his life.

It didn't get better, not in my book. I mean if you weren't looking too hard at what just happened or who might be down the road or at some other stuff. Maybe living well is the art of not looking at that, at the other stuff, when you don't have to. Or being okay with it.

God, the names. You could almost walk into the words themselves." Now Jack put down his cup. He'd never heard anyone say that and it was true. For a moment he lost the blithe tempo of their conversation that had shielded him from his own shyness.

But I should have known.

I lift my head from the pillow I see the frost the moon. Lowering my head I think of home.

You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace. And don't worry, compa, you will be rowdy and out of control again. You will throw off every kind of light. You can't help yourself.

She reached across, grabbed my hand. I'm not going anywhere, Hig, she said. Where would I go? Lots of places, I thought but I didn't say anything. To the other side for one. Or way way inside. A lot of places someone else can never follow.

And a spiderweb's gleamings in the exposed roots of a cut bank. And in a tailwater pool: the spreading rings of rising trout, dapping silently like slow rain.

You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid.