Quotes About Introspection

When you're on your own, you look for signs. Sometimes you make them up, sometimes they're actually there, but most of the time you can't tell the difference from the two.

we all have at least one book hiding in the body

Hell, everybody is a masochist. Some of us are just a little more private.

It was amazing what I could remember about myself when I retraced my own steps.

I wish I could say that I'm totally healed; but that would be a lie. This much I can say: I'm as straightforward and transparent as I'm capable of being. In the recovery process, I've searched relentlessly for total healing. I don't know if that labels me quick or slow, truly open or slightly self-deceived.

There is no more pressure on my rudder, he once remarked. Plain sailing, no drag on other people either. A bit of dancing now and then, that's fine. I still see those girls, but I pretend they're paintings. Or advertisements. But that was only later.

We are our secrets, and, if all goes well, we will take them with us to where no-one can touch them.

Wij hebben het nu over jou. Vergeet niet, ik ben notaris geweest. Ik maak die dingen altijd af. Wat wil jij worden?' 'Ik weet het niet.' Hij begreep dat dat geen goed antwoord was, maar het was het enige, zelfs als iemand graag altijd alles afmaakte. Hij had geen flauw idee. Eigenlijk wist hij zeker dat hij nooit iets wou, maar ook nooit iets zóú worden. De wereld was al boordevol met mensen die iets waren, en de meesten waren er duidelijk niet gelukkig mee.

He felt as if he'd dived into a deep, clear lake and discovered it was a shallow, knee-deep pond. What did you do? Well, you stood up. You rinsed your mud-caked knees and pulled your feet out of the muck. And you were more cautious after that. You knew, from then on, that the world was a smaller place than you'd expected.

He can guess, but he won't ever know, not really. What it was like, what she was thinking, everything she'd never told him.

I have measured my life with coffee spoons and do I dare to eat a peach?' 'DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE?

Before that she hadn't realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could know it over and shatter it.

It was so easy, she thought with some disdain, to find out about people. It was all out there, everything about them. You just had to look. You could figure out anything about a person if you just tried hard enough.

and Mia realized that she was crossing into a place she would have to go alone.

She had felt, finally, as if she could speak without immediately bumping into the hard shell of her sheltered life, as if she suddenly saw that the solid walls penning her in were actually bars, with spaces between them wide enough to slip through.

At least I know who I am. What I want,

She drove on into the night, homeward, her hair weeping tiny slow streams down her back.

She thought, as she would often for many years, of the photograph from that day, with the one golden feather inside it: Was it a portrait of her, or her daughter? Was she the bird trying to batter its way out, or was she the cage?

a haze of formless, pervasive emotion, nothing she could grasp, but full of looming thoughts that appeared from nowhere, startling her, then receded into whiteness again before she was even sure what she had seen.

Hannah, as if she understood her place in the cosmos, grew from quiet infant to watchful child: a child fond of nooks and corners, who curled up in closets, behind sofas, under dangling tablecloths, staying out of sight as well as out of mind, to ensure the terrain of the family did not change.)

Before that she hadn't realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.

Some pictures belong to the person who took them. And some belong to the person inside them.

She thought, as she would often for many years, of the photograph from that day, with the one golden feather inside it: Was it a portrait of her, or her daughter? Was she the bird trying to batter its way free, or was she the cage?

He had been the only one listening for so long.