Quotes About Introspection

I've never been free in my whole life. Inside I've always chased myself. I've become intolerable to myself. I live in a lacerating duality. I'm seemingly free, but I'm a prisoner inside of me.

Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?

It would seem, from this, that the people of Omanorion had mastered the ultra-civilized art of minding their own business.

There are springs in the mind from which others cannot drink.

Each of us may have a different process for committing to our likeness. But what is universal is that your intent must be to answer this question: who do I truly want to become?

As difficult as it may seem, you've got to be honest with yourself about this whole process. Change can often be difficult, and it will probably seem easier to just stick with what you are already doing. That thinking can be dangerous. You're only kicking the can down the road, and you risk waking up one day, years later, looking into the mirror, asking yourself: What am I doing with my life?

Sometimes this genius goes dark and drowns in the bitter wells of his heart.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." —T. S. ELIOT, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

A yellow leaf fluttered down from overhead and settled in his lap, a clear, almost transparent yellow against the brownness of the robe. He moved to brush it off and then he let it stay. For who am I, he thought, to interfere with or dispute even such a simple thing as the falling of a leaf. He

I sometimes think, said Jason, that the soul may be a state of mind.

He stood quietly in the dark and silence, and the voice of a century of living seemed to speak to him in a silent language. All things are hard, it said. There is nothing easy.

Artists often feel sad without knowing why. They sense the cruel inevitability of fate. They smell the coppery scent of death. All artists live in a permanent state of angst knowing that what they have created could have been better.

With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.

Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.

What worth was a man who could not be haunted?

Well, it was most likely too late; there would not be time for me to flagellate myself for every dishonorable deed in that list, nor any chance to make good the harms I'd done. Minor harms, to be sure, in the scheme of things; but large enough to regret.

My books are my confessions.

I don't like crowds of any kind. A dinner party of more than six people is not, for me, a pleasure. I get less social as I get older... I am very resistant to anything that keeps me away from the business of making these journeys into the fantastique. They are my reason for being on the planet, as far as I can comprehend, and I pursue them to the cost of almost anything.

And to think, she'd once had the hots for him, back in the old days (six months ago) when razor-thin men with noses like Durante and an encyclopaedic knowledge of de Niro movies had really been her style. Now she saw him for what he was, flotsam from a lost ship of hope. Still a pill-freak, still a theoretical bisexual, still devoted to early Polanski movies and symbolic pacifism.

Outside, somewhere near, the world would soon be waking. He had watched it wake from the window of this very room, day after day, stirring itself to another round of fruitless pursuits, and he'd known, known, that there was nothing left out there to excite him.

Her mother had always said that women, being more at peace with themselves than men, needed fewer distractions from their hurts.

I feel things other people don't. I don't think it's particularly clever of me, or anything like that. I just do it.

No. No, I'm not." Then she said: "I'm somebody else. I just don't know who that somebody else is yet." "Well that's what journeys are for," Diamanda Murkitt said.

We're making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.