Quotes About Introspection

How this darkness soaks me through and through

The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.

I'd rather be at Wragby, where I can go about and be still, and not stare at anything or do any performing of any sort. This tourist performance of enjoying oneself is too hopelessly humiliating: it's such a failure.

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

He would be alone, and apart from life, which was all he wanted.

Paul walked with something screwed up tight inside him. He would have suffered much physical pain rather than this unreasonable suffering at being exposed to strangers

I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don't know what I feel. Yet it seems to me I am happy.

Chimaera Most people, today, are chimaera chimerical: just fantasies of self-importance their own self-importance and sphinxes of self-consciousness.

You can't lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You've always got yourself on your hands in the end: and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous-neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end.

All our troubles, says somebody wise, come upon us because we cannot be alone.

sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.

Because I feel you did something to him - sort of broke him - broke his manliness. What did you do? If I broke his manliness, it must have been a very easy thing to break.

She suddenly became aware of his keen blue eyes upon her, taking her all in. Instantly her broken boots and her frayed old frock hurt her. She resented his seeing everything. Even he knew that her stocking was not pulled up. She went into the scullery, blushing deeply. And afterwards her hands trembled slightly at her work, she nearly dropped all she handled. When her inside dream was shaken, her body quivered with trepidation. She resented that he saw so much.

I look at my hands, and wonder what they are doing there. That water there ripples right through me. I'm sure that I am that rippling. It runs right through me, and I through it. There are no barriers between us... A sort of disseminates consciousness, that's all there is of me. I feel as if my body were laying empty, as if I were in the other things - clouds and water-... the individual bodily me is discarded. But if so then I am not alive here. I'm sure it would destroy me.

The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him; just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was also a necessity.

I don't hate men because they're men, as nuns do. I dislike them because they're not men enough: babies, and playboys, and poor things showing off all the time, even to themselves. I don't say I'm any better. I only wish, with all my soul, that some men were bigger and stronger and deeper than I am...

It did seem as if Hermione, like the moon, had only one side to her penny. There was no obverse. She stared out all the time on the narrow, but to her, complete world of the extant consciousness. In the darkness, she did not exist.

Frequently he hated Miriam. He hated her as she bent forward and pored over his things. He hated her way of patiently casting him up, as if he were an endless psychological account. When he was with her, he hated her for having

And he was always aware of this fall of silence on his entry, the shutting off of life, the unwelcome. But now it was gone too far to alter.

You pluck flower after flower — it is never the flower. The flower itself — its calyx is a horrible gulf, it is the bottomless pit.

She waited patiently till she could go upstairs and think her own thoughts.

The hideousness {the author] sees is the reflection of himself, and of the automatic meat-lust with which he approaches another individual…Even the most "beautiful" woman is still a human creature. If {the author] approached her as such, as a being instead of as a piece of lurid meat, he would have no horrors afterwards. (in 1924, writing in response to a misogynistic article titled, 'The Ugliness of Women'.)

A man's most dangerous moment... is when he's getting into his shirt. Then he puts his head in a bag.

There is love, and it is a deep thing, but there are deeper things than love. — D.H. Lawrence