Quotes About Introspection

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.

Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole--they see all sorts of things--they see themselves...

Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever. What then can I touch? What brick, what stone? and so draw myself across the enormous gulf into my body safely?

When they were alone, they said nothing. They looked at the view; they looked at what they knew, to see if what they knew might perhaps be different today. Most days it was the same.

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

There is something I want-something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.

You're infinitely simpler than I am… That's the difficulty.

I like observing people. I like looking at things.

I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.

She felt as if things were moving past her as she lay stretched on the bed under the single sheet. But it's not landscape any longer, she thought; it's people's lives, their changing lives.

Doesn't it make you melancholy—looking at the stars?

Some people go to priests; others to poetry...I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken.

I like reading my own writing. It seems to fit me closer than it did before.

When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better--her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties

but after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter 'I.' One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter 'I.

When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.

She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.

I to my friends, to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken.

I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.

The inner life has its soft and gentle beauty; an abstract formlessness as well as a subtle charm. I often consider myself as a figure in a foggy painting: faltering lines, insecure distances, and a merging of greys and blacks. An emotion or a mood—a mere wisp of color—is shaded off and made to spread until it becomes one with all that surrounds it.

People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more then they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.

I fear I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life.

I know this room too well - this view too well - I am getting it all out of focus, because I can't walk through it.