Quotes About Introspection

He reasoned that, as there was nothing he could do about his feelings, he must avoid acting on them.

They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet. Beneath

There was, he knew, within him, hidden deep and far away, a great slumbering turbulence he could neither understand nor reach, a turbulence that was also a void, the business of unfinished things.

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that and who can't forget, and for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life.

Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road.

All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done.

It was as if I'd already left some time before and was just catching up with myself.

It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant--often it happened in the middle of the night--and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.

I don't, after all, know what's wrong with him, am not even certain anything is, or that wrong isn't just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what's amiss, if anything, is not much different from what's indistinctly amiss with all of us at one time or another – we're not happy, we don't know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.

Possibly in the lobby she saw someone who reminded her too much of herself (that can happen to inexperienced travelers). Or worse. That no one there reminded her of anyone she ever knew.

Would you think he was anybody like you?

I don't know what makes people do what they do, or call themselves what they call themselves, only that you have to live someone's life to be the expert.

don't see what this has to do with us." I say back, "Does everything have to be about you? Can you not project yourself outside yourself? Can you not take on another's life for your own benefit?

And one day you woke up and you found yourself in the very situation you said you would never ever be in, and you did not know what was most important to you anymore. (Sweethearts, 1986)

Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that and who can't forget, and for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life.

Something draws you... An impatience with your own ignorance.

apropos of nothing.

for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret.

I don't care to see Dr. Stopler and have my weaknesses vetted. My weaknesses, after all, have taken me this far.

What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed—caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present. Who