Quotes About Introspection

As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view...

Now I will walk, as if I had an end in view, across the room, to the balcony under the awning. I see the sky, softly feathered with its sudden effulgence of moon. I also see the railings of the square, and two people without faces, leaning like statues against the sky. There is then a world immune from change. When I have passed through this drawing room flickering with tongues that cut me like knives, making me stammer, making me lie, I find faces rid of features, robed in beauty.

But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms. These weeks give one a plunge into deep waters. One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth.

I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year's diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles.

To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now...

I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces [...]. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. [...] They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

So the days pass and I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotised, as a child by a silver globe, by life; and whether this is living. It's very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial perhaps. I should like to take the globe in my hands and feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy, and so hold it, day after day. I will read Proust I think. I will go backwards and forwards.

Thinking was torment; why not give up thinking, and drift and dream?

It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. There rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one's being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover.

Now then is my chance to find out what is of great importance, and I must be careful, and tell no lies.

O amor torna a gente solitária, pensou.

I took the print of life not outwardly, but inwardly upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre. I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance, but no name.

Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here's death, she thought.

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy.

Nothing exists outside of us except a state of mind...

I catch your eye. I, who had been thinking myself so vast, a temple, a church, a whole universe, confined and capable of being everywhere on the verge of things and here too, am now nothing but what you see.

The brain is always thinking, but who is it who is thinking?

Shakespeare's state of mind

I am growing up. I am losing some illusions, perhaps to acquire others.

Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

How then did it work out, this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?

Kendisi nedir ? Herkesin gördüÄŸü ÅŸey midir? Yoksa olduÄŸunuz ÅŸey mi?

It is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw.

Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories.