Quotes About Introspection

I knew my mother's feet, her clothes, her two-tone black and white shoes - and long after I was sure of it I made myself stand in their midst, folded deep inside myself like a sick pigeon with its eyes closed.

the minibar cart, even church clocks tolling the hour, de Westertoren, Krijtberg, a dark edge to the clangor, an inwrought fairy-tale sense of doom. By day I sat on the foot of the bed straining to puzzle out the Dutch-language

I stood in the shadiest corner I could find with my mass-market paperback and, with a red pencil, went through and underlined a lot of particularly bracing sentences: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." "A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind." What would Thoreau have made of Las Vegas: its lights and rackets, its trash and daydreams, its projections and hollow façades?

Sometimes, during the course of the listless day (dazed hours on the sofa, paging dully through the Encyclopaedia Britannica) these thoughts struck Harriet with such fresh force that she crawled in the closet and closed the door and cried, cried with her face in the taffeta skirts of her mother's dusty old party dresses, sick with the certainty that what she felt was never going to get anything but worse.

Forgive me for all the things I did but mostly for the things I did not.

my diddy said it was something wrong with any man that'll sit down in a chair and read a book.

III. We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. —FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

By quarter of ten I was sitting on the floor of my room at Hobie's house with my mind reeling like a spun-down top wobbling and veering from side to side.

And now," said Julian, when everything was quiet, "I hope we are all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime?

Suddenly, I was struck by a horrible thought: is this what it's like? Is this the way it's going to be from now on?

Todos los grandes cuadros son en realidad autorretratos.

It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment then for what is was; I suppose we never do.

Estamos tan acostumbrados a disfrazarnos para los demás que al final nos disfrazamos para nosotros mismos.   FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time.

it wasn't until I had helped to kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be

Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? Remember

Qualunque cosa ci insegni a parlare con noi stessi è importante qualunque cosa ci insegni a cullarci fino a uscire dalla disperazione.

But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure.

It's often pain tha makes us more aware of self

That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.

I knew then, and know now, virtually nothing

It was because I thought too much, lived too much in the mind.

In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.

You don't need a point. The point is maybe that the point is too big to see or work round to on our own