Quotes About Introspection

Un uomo? -risposi ridendo- Un uomo è cosa ancor più triste e più orrenda di questo mucchio di carne sfatta. Un uomo è orgolgio, crudeltà, tradimento, viltà, violenza. La carne sfatta è tristezza, pudore, paura, rimorso, speranza. Un uomo, un uomo vivo, è poca cosa, in confronto di un mucchio di carne marcia.

It all depended on what their grandmother was really like, inside herself where she was who she really was. Not outside. Dicey knew about the difference between outside and inside.

All she knew was that his smile lit up the morning as the rising sun does. For a moment, looking at his face, it was as if her ribs were empty, hollow, as if the world had stopped forever while she looked into his eyes as blue as the bellflowers that grew wild across the meadows. For a moment, just until her beating heart had returned to her chest, Birle had thought she understood everything about herself she had never understood before.

She was too often too close to off balance, she knew that.

I enjoy almost everything I do, perhaps because when I don't enjoy something, I don't do it. I enjoy writing; I enjoy teaching; I enjoy having a family to live among. I am neither a feminist nor an antifeminist, because it seems to me that we are first human beings and after that men and women. Human beings have, so far, proved interesting enough to keep me busy just trying to figure out what might be right and true about them.

As best she could, in her secluded position, she was considering how she might secure further choices, and what they might be — once this, her first free choice, had played itself out.

It was almost as if he'd been a ghost in all those rooms, all those days, a ghost in his own life.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

art is made by the alone for the alone… The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication...

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)

Learning To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

So he left her, and she was alone. Very few people cared for her, and she for very few people. She remained alone with herself, waiting.

a traveler, the purer form, someone who collects impressions, dense anatomies of feeling but does not care to record them.

It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, till they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly, she was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, breaking the threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear.

If only there weren't so many other people in the world,' he said lugubriously.

There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see.

Perhaps you're a slave to your own idea of yourself.

He felt if he could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die.

These sentences, evidently the ripened grain of many dark hours, took Gerald by surprise.

The mighty question arises upon us, what is one's own real self? It certainly is not what we think we are and ought to be.