Quotes About Introspection

was broadcasting his doubts.

I imagined were his own litmus test, saying, "If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul to lose.

He didn't want to think about the past, present, or future. He didn't want to feel bad, or feel anything, so he drank some more.

Watkins, S.B.,

Sweetness and Night Long past indignant at the loss of dignity, almost amused by it, but not, every moment of the day a strip search in public, every breath a punishment for what? she couldn't say, which makes her no less penitent, sitting forward, head bowed, in the chair she can't get out of without help, which is itself another punishment,

Sometimes I think that I've never been so free as during that couple of hours when I'm trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end. Everything's dead, but good, because it's dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive.

items that have become part of me, foliage that has grown to conceal the bare stem of my real personality, what I was like before I ever saw these books, or any book at all, come to that.

Because when on a raw and frosty morning I get up at five o'clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor and all the rest still have another hour to snooze before the bells go, I slink downstairs through all the corridors to the big outside door with a permit running-card in my fist, I feel like the first and last man in the world, both at once, if you can believe what I'm trying to say.

I owe my solitude to other people.

You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.

I try to keep a low profile in general. Not with my art, but just as a person.

What's that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I'm able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I'm older. Thank God for growing up.

I was always such a people-watcher. I would sit on street corners alone and watch people and make up stories about them in my head. Then, all of a sudden, I was the one being watched.

I am what I am Are you what you are or What?

I give myself strength by staying away from any music.

there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.

One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away.

We all have it in us to be something other than what we are, I thought, but we don't often get a glimpse of what we could have been. Most of us are better off for the not knowing.

I've only been on this planet for ten minutes,' I said. 'Already I feel like I've overstayed my welcome.' Purslane looked at me with icy forbearance. 'Work really hard, and maybe next time you can get it down to five.

Life was a very odd thing indeed, he reflected, when you really thought about it.

She would worry, just as you worry. It's the people who don't worry—those who never have any doubts that what they're doing is good and right—they're the ones that cause the problems.

Perhaps there was some loop or circuit missing from the brains of people like Garlin, some absent process that prevented them from seeing themselves from outside their own skin, in all their ludicrousness. But to a degree, Sparver reflected, it must also be absent from those they swept up into their movements.

I want to make sense of the world, Doctor. I want to undo the screws, take off its elegant face, glimpse the glittering movement, poke around in the gears and then decide if it's broken or not. Then I want to know if there is anything we can do to put it back together again. There may not be, but at least we'd have the satisfaction of knowing.' ' We'd be satisfied by our own impotence?' ' We won't know until we try