Quotes About Reflection

accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be...may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say...

He looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? DO we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?

Like you, I think of myself as many things, as if the thinking made it so. In the meantime, while I think - while you think, while we think - our actions and inactions create and destroy the world.

I hit the spacebar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, 'To mourn,' and then, 'To try to live,' he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, 'Neither.' 'For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?' I wrote, 'For the rest of my life.

I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.

Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?

Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.

She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them. God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch - man created in the image of what? the animals? - the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.

How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

We just stood there, facing each other, but nine floors apart.

I think about all of the things I've done, Oskar. And all of the things I didn't do. The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.

If I'd been somone else in a different world I'd've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live.

I can be funny, because I have time to meditate about how to be funny, and I can repair my mistakes when I perform mistakes, and I can be a melancholy person in manners that are interesting, not only melancholy. With writing, we have second chances.

When I got off the plane, after eleven hours of travel and forty years away, the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, To mourn, and then, To mourn try to live, he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, Neither. For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live? For as long as I can. Are we talking about a weekend or a year? I didn't write anything. The man said, Next.

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles.