Quotes About Introspection

He had discovered love; but he had also begun to discover that love, far from making him 'what he was', far from spreading deep content all over him like carnation oil, would make him self-conscious and indecisive. He loved Tanya most clearly when he was away from her. When they were together, there were expectations on both sides which he was either unable to identify or couldn't respond to.

The sadness of life. That was another conundrum he would occasionally ponder.

My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I'd been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been.

I didn't want the day to unravel. Though looking back, it was not the day, but the four of us, that were beginning to unravel.

Viver sozinho tem momentos de auto-comiseração e paranóia.

Try as I could—which wasn't very hard—I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don't think this is complacency; it's more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something.

I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn't recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.

But what helps? What do we need to know? Not everything. Everything confuses. Directness also confuses. The full-face portrait staring back at you hypnotises. Flaubert is usually looking away in his portraits and photographs. He's looking away so that you can't catch his eye; he's also looking away because what he can see over your shoulder is more interesting than your shoulder.

You realize that you want official interference into other people's lives but not into your own. You also realize that your truthfulness has become dangerously flexible.

This ought to have given him a whole storetank of existential rage, but somehow it didn't;

Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands—and then out of them. How few of us—we that remain—can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.

One test might be whether, as the years pass, you come out better from your own story, or worse. To come out worse might indicate that you are being more truthful. On the other hand, there is the danger of being retrospectively anti-heroic: making yourself out to have behaved worse than you actually did can be a form of self-praise.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This

Point One. I'm not a go-between. Whatever you say stays in thisroom and it doesn't get leaked back. Point Two. I'm not a shrink, I'm not some kind of advice centre, I don't even much like listening to other people's woes. [...] Point Three. I'm just an old soak whose life hasn't worked out and who lieves alone with her dogs. So I'm not an authority on anything.

Cast out the beam from your own eye before you seek to extract the mote from the eye of another.

Gustave's last years are arid and solitary. He

Una vez dijo que para ser feliz había que cumplir tres requisitos previos –ser estúpido, ser egoísta y gozar de buena saludy que él no estaba seguro de cumplir más que el segundo. De modo que discutí, peleé, pero él quería creer que la felicidad es imposible; esta creencia le proporcionaba cierto extraño consuelo.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves. Dear

I don't want you to be a woman of mystery. I think I'd hate it. Either it's just a façade, a game, a technique for ensnaring men, or else the woman of mystery is a mystery even to herself, and that's the worst of all.

Apropo, cum preferati, autodistrugerea prin lipsa cunoasterii sau prin acumularea cunoasterii de sine?

Try as I could -which wasn't very hard- I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don't this is complacency; it's more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something. I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.

was my closest friend, and continued so for many years. He was the gentlest of us, the most thoughtful, the one who put most trust in others. And—perhaps because of these very qualities—he was the one who had most trouble with girls and, later, women. Was there something about his softness, and his inclination to forgive, which almost provoked bad behaviour in others? I wish I knew the answer to that, not least because of the time I let him down badly. I

What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records -- in words, sound, pictures -- you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping.