Quotes About Reflection

I stood knee deep in the cold water, eyes closed, and listened to the end of the day over the river. Then I opened my eyes and pulled the line and began making long casts upstream just off the bank. The new rod was light and alive in my hand, it was beautiful, and the line sang out fast and smooth with a whisper like scratching a guitar string. I didn't mind the sound at all.

This is how I healed. Or didn't. One evening I took her down to the river. We turned off the highway and rattled slowly up the gravel road and into the heart of the canyon. The walls closed in above us, the high blue of the sky deeper, deep and dark like a river is deep. The highest rock at the rim was a strip of fire, holding the last long sun. The old gorge was a vessel and it was filling with shadow, slowly and with wind.

I flipped through the Duino Elegies

But lying one night in my old bunk under a wide open window listening to a screech owl trying to terrify me with a woman's screams and only making me happy—the bittersweet cry of undigestible beauty and great impending loss—then it came to me: the obvious epiphany that he was reliving his life. Doh. Slide by slide, picture by picture. He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks.

Tonight—it is still night, though barely—I don't say a word, because tonight I am watching myself a little and I have always despised the sentimental, maybe because it is a familiar weakness.

Distantly recall. Standing there with a smile of triumph and his scruffy week old beard. I swear. I start to laugh. That's what he does to me: aggravate me all the way to the point of laughter.

And in each loss was some further exile. Celine wondered just then what the word "home" must mean to her. Probably a space within the relative safety of her own skin.

Funny how you can live your whole life waiting and not knowing it. Waiting for your real life to begin. Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize that when it's too late.

I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.

with a sense of having been spared and having been blessed.

Tomorrow I will do it again but not the boy, I'll bury him not with any tenderness or regret just in one piece with his hawk feather.

This was our ritual while we waited for our lives to truly begin and I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don't know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tentative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience: This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightly. Those times that can fly. That's the way it seems now looking back.

We made love again. This time it was me who asked. Lying there again, on the bed, this time with heat, almost an oven heat, coming through the screen, and sweat instead of tears, I wondered how simple we really are. That we can do the same things again and again and again and find them interesting, even fascinating and seek the repetition with a hunger as avid. How fishing was like that, and painting.

Few people had the luck to die in the prime of life in full appreciation of all the goodness therein. Leave it at that, he thought. As good a place as any.

The fire crackled under the long pan of clear sap and he and his dad didn't say much, but he was aware enough—he'd read enough fiction, he guessed—to realize that these might be the best hours he and his father ever spent together.

I stood back of the new garden watching the sun touch the mountains and ruddle the turned dirt and the threads of water and I can say there was something moving inside that resembled a kind of happiness. I would never have named it. Not then. For fear. But I name it now.

The decorating scheme of Big World is simple in theme but complicated in execution. The theme is: things that shine and things that make noise. There are mirrors and glass railings and columns of polished steel; there are beeping lights and blaring loudspeakers; there are more reflective surfaces here than on a disco ball.

But for now, my point is simply that on the seventh day, it appears that there are no losers. So if you need some losers to feel like a winner, you may not like the seventh day.

In scripture, names work like mirrors that reflect back the essence of a thing. But more than that, they help CREATE a thing.

I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without awareness that I'm carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.

V oby?ejném ?ase, v tom na hodinách, pochopí ?lov?k ur?ité v?ci. Když nechá ?as b?žet, pochopí jiné.

People lack the talent of listening. They miss the experience of a fascinating law of nature: The moment when a narrator is captivated by his own story.

Pienso en él sin camisa. A la luz de la lámpara. A la luz de las velas del árbol de Navidad. A la luz del gato ardiendo. Abandono el pensamiento. Vuelve a mí. Hay pensamientos que están impregnados de cola de pegar

Heart-level honesty in the presence of God postures us for change.