Quotes About Introspection

We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And Lo! It is our own.

To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that's on their minds, even before it's on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a Walkman so what's going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn't much like being talked at; he can't conceal how easily he gets bored.

Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them.

The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.

She started reading novels to put herself in the way of secret lives.

My best critic is me, too late.

I look over my old books, happiest when I find a line it seems I could not have written.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

My soul is not a palace of the past...

A wise man travels to discover himself.

The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.

The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.

No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.

I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises.

I once read a story by this guy named Harlan Ellison ending: That night it rained, everywhere in the known universe. I was never too sure what the ending meant in terms of Ellison's story, but anyone who sits alone in a motel room for hours, watching the rain wash the world away, begins to understand. Knows what it feels like.

I never found out exactly what it was that had hurt my friend so–something working in him a long time, that finally found purchase. In future years I'd come to recognize similar things scrabbling for footholds within myself. They were already there, of course, even then. Sometimes at night I heard them breathing.

I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.

I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must remember that

Look now. It will never be more fascinating.

Other men's sins are before our eyes; our own are behind our back.

How bloated we all are to think that our childhoods matter, that anybody really cares about our little lives.

There are people who have too much space between their ears, and given the time, do nothing but free fall forever inside their head. It's a spooky thing to be left alone inside an angry innerverse.

It's a spooky thing to be left alone inside an angry innerverse.