Quotes About Introspection

His ass knows more words than his mouth does.

Self-knowledge, she thought ruefully, is mostly bad news.

Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power.

I was seduced by the notion that the long walks I was taking made me a flâneur, too.

Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a certain amount, but I sure as hell dont understand everything.

Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.

It's funny how strangers can pass in front of you every day and all you see is a flat shadow, a vague outline, not noticing any of the details. They move in a gray crowd, always looking the same and acting the same, simple caricatures of who they really are, but once you get to know them, you notice the specific, tiniest things, you pay attention to the intricacies of their personalities, their habits and particular ways of walking and talking, the subtle changes in their appearance and dress.

Her sentences were icebergs, with just the tip of her thought coming out of her mouth, and the rest kept up in her head, which I was starting to think was more and more beautiful the longer I looked at her.

I just have to be smarter than my own mind.

Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.

Writing often reveals us to ourselves, lets us name what's important to us and what has been silent or silenced inside us.

Her eye and my 'I': Her gazing Creates me.

Self-Portrait at Twenty" I stood inside myself like a dead tree or a tower. I pulled the rope of braided hair and high above me a bell of leaves tolled. Because my hand stabbed its brother, I said: Make it stone. Because my tongue spoke harshly, I said: Make it dust. And yet it was not death, but her body in its green dress I longed for. That's why I stood for days in the field until the grass turned black and the rain came.

I entered the empty room. I sat on the floor and drew pictures all day. One day I held a picture against the bare wall: it was a window. Climbing through, I stood in a sloping field at dusk. As I began walking, night settled. Far ahead in the valley, I saw the lights of the village, and always at my back, I felt the white room swallowing what was passed. from "The Room," Selected and New Poems. (Wesleyan University Press, 1988)

William Butler Yeats was after the same point when he remarked: "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said 'I want to be let alone!' There is all the difference.

Your joys and sorrows. You can never tell them. You cheapen the inside of yourself if you do tell them.

I want to be alone.

I grasped two things: I wasn't as happy as I could be, and my life wasnt going to change unless I made it change.

Like water, I have no skin...only surface tension.

She lifts her face to the breeze and lets her unhappiness lie quiet, like a calmed baby who will grow fractious again when it wakes to the difficult business of living.

Sometimes I really do wonder if everything is just random and pointless, whether there's any meaning to anything in this life.

I have spent my life laboriously doing nothing.

If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.