Quotes About Introspection

Being near Tom and Doug at night kept me from having to say to myself I am not afraid whenever I heard a branch snap in the dark or the wind shook so fiercely it seemed something bad was about to happen. But I wasn't out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I'd come, I'd realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really -- all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn't do that while tagging along with someone else.

Every now and then I could see myself—truly see myself—and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart.

She was. She was imperfect. She made mistakes. But she was her best self more often than it's reasonable for any human to be.

But I wasn't out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I'd come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really—all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn't do that while tagging along with someone else.

But I wasn't out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I'd come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really—all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me.

Don't stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don't fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight.

I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.

I'd only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren't things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.

saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.

Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

I think of quotes as mini–instruction manuals for the soul. It

all the things I'd done in my life, of all the versions of myself I'd lived out, there was one that had never changed: I was a writer.

You get to define the terms of your life. You get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of your feelings...

Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

It's a lie you've told yourself that has flattened down whatever hurts.

Stop asking yourself what you want, what you desire, what interests you. Ask yourself instead: What has been given to me? Ask: What do I have to give back? Then give it.

It seemed like a long time and also it seemed like my trip had just begun, like I was only now digging into whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the woman with the hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller.

What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

I'd set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again.

Thinking deeply about your choices and actions from the stance of your future self can serve as both a motivational and a corrective force.

Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light," I

It was a world I'd never been to and yet had known was there all along, one I'd staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been.

In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren't only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.