Quotes About Introspection

I came to myself, saw myself as itself and the world for what it is, and began to love life. Hm, better stop the bleeding in that case. After all, why not live? Bad as things are still when all is said and done, one can sit on a doorstep in the winter sunlight and watch sparrows kick leaves.

that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.

I didn't respond to him. Couldn't speak at all. Couldn't look at his self-mutilation--not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained house painter's hand. They seemed more like puppets than hands. I had no feelings in it either.

what are out stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

You are a steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer we could call you a scrupulous coroner.

I wonder what my baby is thinking at this moment, he called, rubbing his stomach with his hands. What I was thinking about was whether or not his being my mother was going to wreck my nightly friction ritual.

The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness. Perhaps, Dominick, you have yet to emerge fully from the pond where you swam that morning so long ago. And perhaps, when you do, you will no longer look into the water and see the reflection of a son of a bithc.

Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself.

And in taking on the subject of themselves-making themselves vulnerable to the unseen reader-they have exchanged powerlessness for for the power that comes with self-awareness.

Being in your mid-thirties brought benefits, I reminded myself. You began to appreciate tidiness, smallness, things in their place. This is the shape your life has taken, I said. Be existential. Go to sleep.

You are a meticulous steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer, we could call you a scrupulous coroner.

For five minutes, neither of us spoke. I stared ahead and watched the seat upholstery go blurry from my tears.

I'd gone to her directly from Dr. Shaw's office - gone without an appointment to find out if happiness was a football you caught or something more complicated, something you had to invent.

I'm not supposed to need fixing; I'm the strong one—the lookout.

Too bad I didn't know you back then, I would have come and rescued you. Like he was Prince Charming or something. Which he is, in a way, because he rescued me from the simple, uncomplicated life I thought I liked until I realized how much I was missing. How lonely that life had been: going to work, going home, and watching TV, going places by myself on weekends.

Getting your head shrunk could only take you so far, and then it came time to drop to your knees and humble yourself. Ask forgiveness of God the Father. Or, in my case, God the Stepfather. And, goddamnit, my knees just didn't seem to bend that way.

Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way, I told myself. I bet she's had a very hard life.

On Friday Ma came timidly out to the pool wearing her beach robe. In her hands she held her equipment: cup of tea, cigarettes, nasal spray. She struggled with the gate, walked up to the water, and dunked her big toe. "Cold," she said.

What are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

I wasn't crazy about this idea, but it seemed less complicated than suicide. All I'd have to do was sit in the dark and breathe.

re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body. [From the preface to Leaves Grass]

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun.... there are millions of suns left, You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.... nor look through the eyes of the dead.... nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibility of their own souls.

I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is