Quotes About Introspection

I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people.

She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.

It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with great reluctance. They stood together in front of the looking-glass, and with a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been feeling nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness. But it chilled them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things.

He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea.

Here, she felt, putting the spoon down, was the still space that lies about the heart of things, where one could move or rest...

The only truth which she could discover was the truth of what she herself felt.

Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness...

They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and then do what other people do when they have done it.

For the whole world seemed to have dissolved in this early morning hour into a pool of thought, a deep basin of reality, and one could almost fancy that had Mr. Carmichael spoken, for instance, a little tear would have rent the surface pool. And then? Something would emerge. A hand would be shoved up, a blade would be flashed. It was nonsense of course.

When I say to myself 'Bernard,' who comes?

And thus she made it impossible for me to roll out my sonorous phrases about 'elemental feelings,' the 'common stuff of humanity,' 'depths of the human heart,' and all those other phrases which support us in our belief that, however clever we may be on top, we are very serious, very profound and very humane underneath.

The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.

She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own...

Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences.

Si no dices la verdad sobre ti mismo, difícilmente podrás decir la de las otras personas.

Che fantasmagoria è mai il nostro spirito, luogo di convegno di tante cose dissimili! Talvolta deploriamo la nostra nascita, le nostre ricchezze, e aspiriamo a un'esaltazione ascetica; subito dopo, ci lasciamo intenerire dal profumo di qualche vecchio viottolo di giardino, e versiamo lacrime al canto dei tordi.

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded. The brain must wake now. The body must contract now, entering the house, the lighted house, where the door stood open, where the motor cars were standing, and bright women descending: the soul must brave itself to endure. He opened the big blade of his pocket-knife.

Her eyes seemed to question, to commiserate, to be, for a second, love itself.

Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity!

She liked to be alone; she liked to be herself

For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate, but when communication is established they fall silent.

How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?

After all, we are not responsible. We are not judges. We are not called upon to torture our fellows with thumb-screws and irons; we are not called upon to mount pulpits and lecture them on pale Sunday afternoons. It is better to look at a rose, or to read Shakespeare as I read him here in Shaftesbury Avenue.

You look, eat, smile, are bored, pleased, annoyed - that is all I know. Yet this shadow which has sat by me for an hour or two, this mask from which peep two eyes, has power to drive me back, to pinion me down among all those other faces, to shut me in a hot room; to send me dashing like a moth from candle to candle.