Quotes About Introspection

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.

I suppose it's fair to say that I am interested in the invention of self or selves. We're all born into certain circumstances with particular physical traits, unique developmental experiences, geographical and historical contexts.

To be a great artist, you need to know yourself as best as you possibly can. I live my life and delve into my own psyche. It's more about exploring how I feel rather than making pale imitations of something that came before. We are unique beings, and the way we look at things is our own.

Similarly, only people as misanthropic as myself can be counted on not to have to lie to others, since we have the unique luxury of not caring what sort of opinions others formulate about us.

There's nothing particularly unique about my experiences except that they're my experiences.

Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.

I think that people in the phase between being someone's kid and being someone's parent have always been uniquely narcissistic, but that social media and Twitter and LiveJournal make it really easy to navel-gaze in a way that you've never been able to before.

We don't believe other people's experiences can tell us all that much about our own. I think this is an illusion of uniqueness.

People in the United Kingdom and outside the United States share my bemusement with the United States that America doesn't share with itself.

The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.

The universal narrator knows all and can enter a character's head any time he chooses.

Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus.

No matter who the characters are, you can strip them down and find small universal truths.

When I write I'm never really thinking about themes or the universal.

Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we're saved!) other people are real again, and we're fond of them.

I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.

I've never been particularly religious, but I have recently acknowledged the universe and it's crazy powers, and that will probably fluctuate for the rest of my life.

I read about eastern philosophy and religion and existentialism. All that introspective thinking got me thinking about the great beyond. That turned my sights from inwards to outwards, and I started becoming interested in the makeup of the universe, and I started reading about astronomy, planets, and galaxies.

Maybe the universe will get tired of me.

For each one of us stands alone in the midst of a universe.

One of the things that was kind of shocking for humans... was to come to terms with was the fact that, hey, we may not be the center of the universe.

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator.