Quotes About Introspection

The mystics may have found solace in the meditative life, but I think there are days when memory and solitude are not one's friend.

Solitude and peace with oneself are probably the only preparation one has for death.

The sky was purple, streaked with fire, the palm trees like scorched tin cutouts against the sun. I woke at four in the morning and could not sleep again, my heart congealed with a sense of mortality that I could not explain.

God, don't let me be an old fool, I prayed.

spent the rest of the afternoon in my room. A faucet was ticking in the bathroom as loudly as a mechanical clock, with the same sense of urgency and waste. I tried to tighten the

Instead, he lived inside his loneliness

She was one of those women who seemed to choose solitude and plainness over beauty, and anger over happiness.

James Lee Burke

His jaw went slack, the way an old man's does when his thought processes take him into blind alleys.

I would start with four fingers of Jack in a thick mug, with a sweating Budweiser back, and by midnight I would be alone at the end of the bar, armed, drunk, and hunched over my glass, morally and psychologically insane.

I didn't mind being alone. Solitude and peace with oneself are probably the only preparation one has for death.

When I closed my eyes, a lantern lit up the inside of my head, as if I had punched a hypodermic loaded with morphine into my arm.

No, I'm a coonass, my religion is shaky, and I've never hit the juice.

I can't really say." "It amounts to believing others when they tell you you're a good fellow. Give that some thought.

I didn't know who Ernest Hemingway was until I moved to Key West and visited his house on Whitehead Street," she said. "Then I started reading his books, and I saw something in one of them I never forgot. He said the test of all morality is whether you feel good or bad about something the morning after.

He has finally learned that lying to oneself is an offense for which human beings seldom grant themselves absolution. He comes to believe that acceptance of a wintry place in the soul and a refusal to speak about it to others is as much consolation as a man gets, and for some odd reason that thought seems to bring him peace.

I could feel myself slipping inside that dark alcoholic envelope of depression and regret that for long periods had been characteristic of my adult life.

on a plane I like to be left to myself, as the clouds and the sky and drone of the motor all make me feel dreamy, and dreams are a solo enterprise.

They find "sources of strength in the self to develop the self.

Some see the self in the self by means of the self through meditation; others through S??khya yoga; and others through the yoga of action.

a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an

Most times I don't know what I'm doing. Sometimes I feel like I don't hardly know enough to tie my own shoes.

A body can't prosper if a person don't know who they are. That makes you poor as a pea, not knowing who you are inside. That's worse than being anything in the world on the outside.

He saw now she was not just handsome, but rather had a quiet, cumulative beauty. She was a tall woman, middle-aged, whose face was not etched with the stern lines of church folks who've seen too much and done little about it other than pray.