Quotes About Introspection

I wondered what it was to pray, because it was something I have never learned to do, and all I remember is falling.

What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

I broke out into a sweat and the worlds of Rilke, the poet, entered my brain -- his notion that we are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.

Susan, nonetheless, wanted to know why she was having such a dating problem. Dusty said, I think your problem is that you think everyone else is a freak except you, but everybody's a freak- you included- and once you learn that, the World of Dating is yours.

I then return to my seat and something happens to me-- something inside me is exhausted and worn and stops spinning and I break down and cry. I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and grown a million times larger. And I cry because... of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages-- back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter.

Sólo el individuo que vive en soledad es una criatura sujeta a leyes profundas y si sale al empezar la mañana, o mira hacia la tarde que está vibrante de vida y comprende lo que le rodea, entonces todo se desprende de él, como si de un cadáver se tratara, aunque siga en la plenitud de la vida.

It's amazing how you can be a total shithead, and yet your soul still wants to hang out with you.

Marshall alone his room with a comically tall stack of books, methodically absorbing their contents as though they were drugs...

Six silent people in a room got me to thinking about the voice we hear in our heads when we read, the universal narrator's voice you may well be hearing right now. Whose voice *is* it you're hearing? It's not your own, is it? I didn't think so. It never is. So I posed the question out loud..." ...When you read a book, whose voice is it you hear inside your head? It's certainly not my own, said Harj, and the others chimed in with the same claim. Then whose it?

Some day you cross this thin line and you really realize that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.

And yet in the end did we ever really give each other completely to the other? Do either of us even know how to really share ourselves? Imagine the house is on fire and I reach to save one thing - what is it? Do you know? Imagine that I am drowning and I reach within myself to save that one memory which is me - what is it? Do you know? What things would either of us reach for? Neither of us know. After all these years we just wouldn't know.

You know how sometimes after an afternoon nap you wake up with the shakes or anxiety? That's what happened to me. I couldn't remember who I was or where I was or what time of year it was or anything. All I knew was that I was. I felt so wide open, so vulnerable, like a great big field that's just been harvested.

I wish I knew how bad I could become. I wish I could get a printout that showed me exactly how susceptible I was to a long list of sins. Gluttony: 23 percent susceptible. Envy: 68 percent susceptible. Lust: 94 percent susceptible. That kind of thing.

The heart of a man is like deep water.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don't know why, and if we do find out why, it's decades later and knowing why doesn't matter any more.

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities—to clarify just who it is we really are?

And that's the day I became an artist. Nobody blames an artist for noticing stuff.

Sometimes I wonder if it is too late to feel the same things that other people seem to be feeling. Sometimes I want to go up to people and say to them, What is it you are feeling that I am not? Please—that's all I want to know.

Unlike most fine writers, he wasn't in love with his own words.

I have my books. I don't live in the actual world.

To most people, Metcalf had discovered, silence was even more unbearable than pointed questioning.

I have my books. I don't live in the actual world. I am imperturbable.

like me, you prefer the company of fine books to that of other people.

like having death poke his stinking mug into your face to make you think about things.