Quotes About Introspection

I had no way to stop . I did not write Fahrenheit 451, it wrote me.

She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.

Her eyes reversed into herself, to watch the secret heart of herself pounding itself into pieces against the side of her chest.

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.

Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page, from the second and so on, chain-smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the secondhand notions and time-worn philosophies.

The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal.

They want to know what I do with all my time. I tell them that sometimes I just sit and think. But I won't tell them what. I've got them running.

Nearby, an old man was similarly engaged in finding the pattern of his life in the depths of his glass.

So you go in a library, and you pull a book off the shelf, and you open it, and what are you looking for? A mirror. All of a sudden, a mirror is there and you see yourself.

Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?

But no man's a hero to himself. I've lived with me a lifetime. Will. I know everything worth knowing about myself—

Looking at her in the hospital he had thought, I don't know you, who you are, does it matter if we live or die?

I don't know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.

We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks...And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me.

Leaning into the wall as if all of the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there.

Usted no es como los demás. He visto a unos cuantos. Lo sé. Cuando hablo usted me mira. Anoche, cuando dije algo sobre la luna, usted la miró. Los otros nunca harían eso. Los otros se alejarían, dejándome con la palabra en la boca. O me amenazarían. Nadie tiene ya tiempo para nadie.

But I wanted to show what we all have in us, that it has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice. When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange - we are so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

But most of all," she said, "I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going.

Thomas Wolfe ate the world and vomited lava. Dickens dined at a different table every hour of his life. Molière, tasting society, turned to pick up his scalpel, as did Pope and Shaw.

Or maybe he means in a richer world the begging population is melting away. But no to that too. So maybe, perhaps, he means there aren't many 'human beings' left to look, see, and understand well enough for one to ask and one to give. Everyone busy, running, jumping, there's no time to study one another. But I guess that's bilge and hogwash, slop and sentiment.

No quería saber cómo se hacen las cosas sino por qué. Esto puede resultar embarazoso. Uno empieza con los porqués y termina siendo realmente desgraciado. La pobre chica está mejor muerta.

I wish I had known him, but he was just another shadow outside my screen door and I already had a sufficiency of shadows in.

I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.