Quotes About Introspection

To write a novel is always to go naked, whatever you're writing about. You always reveal yourself.

Would it have made a difference? This is the question we always ask after we have given up.

If he were to come away with anything from this schedule, it would be that his life revolved around food and little else. It didn't feel like a meaningless existence, but perhaps that's what happened when you lived alone long enough. When you no longer noticed the silence. Or felt the cold.

Why do we ask the important questions after they've been answered?

The less I speak, the more I meditate.

I'll trust myself, myself shall be my friend.

There is nothing like fear to complicate one's consciousness, inducing previously unknown levels of reflection

It's strange how you're sometimes forced to assume an unsympathetic view of yourself through borrowed eyes.

Jens Bjørneboe wrote that "he who hasn't experienced a full depression alone and over a long period of time—he is a child.

Forsake the world and cling to the shadows.

Only catatonics and coma patients can persevere in a dignified withdrawal from life's rattle and hum.

Sometimes you just have to keep some distance between yourself and reality, even if it means becoming a little less human.

For much of that day I had been secluded in my room, intently pursuing a typical activity of my early life and in the process badly ravaging what previously had been a well-made bed.

Sometimes you just have to keep some distance from yourself and reality, even if it means becoming a little less human.

whatever family name has been given to a case of depression, it has an objective in common with all its kind: to sabotage the network of emotions you had come to identify as the composition of yourself. It is then you discover that your "old self" is not the substantial and inviolable thing you thought it was, nor was the rest of your "old" reality.

To think that another person shared my love for the icy bleakness of things .

Question: How could we know we were keeping certain truths from ourselves regarding how things truly are in this world at its deepest level? Answer: Because we have done it before.

If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.

You see how I live: shadows and silence, leaving things as I find them because I have no reason to disturb them. But there are things that I have known, even though I never wished to know them and cannot give them a name.

I have died so little today, friend, forgive me.

This is my journal. I can be candid here. Candidly, I could not be more miserable.

So, without saying anything to the others, it made its way to the farthest corner of the meadow and began to toast an imaginary muffin. That was always the best way to unwind when things got to be too much for it.

As it turns out, however, the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called "metacognition." This is the ability to know when you're not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you're doing, and then realizing that you're doing it wrong.

You can only miss so many swings in baseball before you have to admit you might not be a good hitter, but you can mangle grammar and syntax every day without ever realizing how poorly you speak.