Quotes About Introspection

You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you're suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization that each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can't ever hope entirely to know anything, not even yourself.

I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong.

Isn't it funny," she said, stroking with an inky finger the beads of condensation on her glass of white wine, "that year was such an unhappy one, for me. Remember poor Reza? And Skandar away so much—and that weather. Do you remember, Nora? I've never had a harder time." (Except, she said "time-e.") "I guess I didn't realize it was

He didn't much like reading novels - he preferred history or philosophy - or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem spoke to him it was as if a brilliant, agonizing light had been turned upon some tiny, private cell of his soul.

When, as a woman, you make yourself the work of art, and when you are then what everyone looks at, then whatever else, you aren't alone.

If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly, or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves. Sirena

Nobody would know me from my own description of myself;

My everyday Appleton life, my phones calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jobs around the reservoir - what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I'd lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced?

We're completely invisible. I thought it wasn't true, or not true of me, but I've learned I am no different at all. The question now is how to work it, how to use that invisibility, to make it burn.

It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly, or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves.

I guess what they say is true—sometimes you have to smack up against a brick wall before you can admit it's time to change or die. For me the death was an emotional one. It's taken me this long to figure out I was killing myself by shutting off my true feelings and desires.

I've come to realize I've spent a lifetime ignoring whole chunks of myself. If feelings didn't fit in with my carefully constructed view of the world and my place in it, I just shut them down. I don't have anyone or anything to blame, unless you can blame a whole society and the way men are taught to look at and approach the world.

Wanting someone else to eat the things you have cooked is the same as wanting that person to know you. I figured eating your own cooking is a way of getting to know yourself.

Humans create terrible things. Why do they make things that only bring them pain? It's because they don't know what's comfortable anymore. So perhaps they don't know they are in pain.

Then-then I'm not going to die? Well, then-crap!-what am I doing here, Anyway?

The truth of the matter is that I had been knocked so a-cock by the notion that I didn't really care tuppence for Corinna that I wasn't quite certain at the time of my own complete sanity. It comes as the devil of a shock, you see, to realise you've let a milk-and-water miss with a pretty face charm you out of your senses, and that you've been building your life for two years around a girl who never existed except in your own imagination

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

I write as if to save somebody's life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.

And it's inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.