Quotes About Introspection

Once writing becomes an act of listening instead of an act of speech, a great deal of the ego goes out of it.

Haalaat chup kara dete hain insaan ko wagarna bolna sabh ko aata hain

You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.

You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?

Hast thou walked in the search of the depth?

that the work may be defined as the poem of a confession

He watched his image in the fountain (the watery faces of his audience) over with Narcissus leans, eternally anxious, eternally enraptured

I was making my living from a joke about my appearance that I didn't understand, and in a way still don't, because when I look in a mirror it doesn't seem funny to me.

There was no feeling at all between Joan and me, so I talked about myself. I talked without stopping for two hours about myself, pulling little sounds of understanding out of poor Joan's mouth the way in prison we pulled plates of food from slots in the doors.

She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.

How do I know what I think till I see what I say?

Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything - though it might have been a good thing if he'd also taught her to question the act of questioning.

We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

I didn't know myself well, and still don't. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relations with them have more than once been abrasive.

The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors. Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions.

Ruth tells me at least once a day that old people, or people getting old, tend to disengage, back away, turn inward, listen only to themselves, and get self-righteous and censorious. And they mustn't. (I mustn't.)

He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe.

Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

sitting in Grandmother's old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life.

He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man WITH SOMETHING THE MATTER WITH HIM.