Quotes About Introspection

I am alone, said Orlando, aloud since there was no one to hear.

To love makes one solitary, she thought.

Sometimes she had it; sometimes not. She never knew why it came or why it went, or if she had it until she came into the room and then she knew instantly by the way some man looked at her

Queer, I mused, to see what we were thinking five years ago.

Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head.

For it was extraordinary to think that they had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not though of them more than once all that time. How eventful her own life had been, during those same years. Yet perhaps Carrie Manning had not thought about her either. The thought was strange and distasteful.

Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions.

Half one's notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own.

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

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

To love makes one solitary, she thought. She

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied

Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall... Here is something definite, something real. thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours.

I am suspended between life and death in an unfamiliar way

Los ojos de los otros, nuestras prisiones; sus pensamientos, nuestras jaulas.

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what purpose?

But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh?

she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.

Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it.

She would not say of anyone that they were this or that.

Hair, pastry, tobacco — of what odds and ends are we compounded,' she said (thinking of Queen Mary's prayer-book). 'What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables! At one moment we deplore our birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes sing.

But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look a the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather.

To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing, For groves of laurel thou wert nevermeant; Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.

Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts