Quotes About Reflection

When I am gripped with despair, when I think I might stop, I speak to my dead. Tell them a story. What am I doing with this life? They hold me accountable. I let them make me bolder or more modest or louder or more moving, but I ask them to listen, and then write.

There is light suddenly everywhere, the light of your life speaking to you. What it tells you is almost the same as what happened. Never mind that almost isn't good enough; it's all you have.

The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do - I think it is even what fiction is for.

Destroying art is practice for destroying people.

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

I needed to teach writing students to hold on—to themselves, to what matters to them, to the present, the past, the future. And to the country. And to do so with what they write. We won't know when the world will end. If it ever does, we will be better served when it does by having done the work we can do.

Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war comes -- and make no mistake, it is already here -- be sure you write for the living too. The ones you love, and the ones who are coming for your life. What will you give them when they get there?

A GOOD PLACE TO begin a garden is to undo whatever appear to be the clear mistakes of previous owners.

I still didn't know I had written it to do this, but then I did. I wish I could show you the roomful of people who've told me the novel is the story of their lives. Each of them as different as could be. I still don't know if I'd be in that room.

Imagine yourself as a pool of light and sound altering as all your days run through you, and they pass again and again. From moment to moment, you are every age you have ever been, but in no particular order. Time courses through you, the time you lived, a flume of your days. This was Peter's dementia.

her interest was not the beginning of a friendship but more of a measuring. She

To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth but into it. My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have seen only in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you.

What would you read to someone who was dying?" Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell?

The life I led now I'd made so I would never be her again. I'd never wanted to be reminded of her and her struggles again. And yet I knew I had always been her; I still was her. I

I tilt my head back and carefully toss my hair over my right shoulder in the way I have seen my younger sister do. I realize I know one more thing about her than I did before - what it feels like to do this and why you would. It's like your own little thunderclap.

Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Follow it up, explore all around it, and before you know it, you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought.

Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so you will be certain to see something you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore around it, and before you know it,something worth thinking about to occupy your mind.

I begin my work at about nine or ten o'clock in the evening and continue until four or five in the morning. Night is a more quiet time to work. It aids thought.

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.

whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

Absorbes mis pensamientos de manera tan íntima como para permitirme pensar en otra cosa –no sólo ocupas mi mente todo el día; te introduces en mi sueño. Te encuentro en cada sueño –y cuando despierto no puedo cerrar mis ojos otra vez por reflexionar sobre tu dulzura.

FAREWELL! A LONG FAREWELL TO ALL MY GREATNESS." PUBLIUS

They formed it almost as soon as they had a political existence; nay, at a time when their habitations were in flames, when many of their citizens were bleeding, and when the progress of hostility and desolation left little room for those calm and mature inquiries and reflections which must ever precede the formation of a wise and well-balanced government for a free people.

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.