Quotes About Introspection

we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be selfish assholes first.

The only place I could reach her. In me.

Maybe it was ridiculous to go on a date with someone I'd barely spoken to and whose main appeal was that he was good-looking and he liked Wilco. I'd certainly done such things with men based on far less.

I was a terrible believer in things, I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was just as searching as I was skeptical.

Who would I be if I didn't? Who would I be if I did?

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.

Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the world feel both bigger and smaller to me.

There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart. If you let it, your jealousy will devour you.

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.

Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; 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.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter,

The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

transformation often depends that we separate our emotional responses from our rational minds.

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." That was me. That was why I'd longed for a companion the night before. That was why I was here, naked in a motel, with this preposterous idea of hiking alone for three months on the PCT.

It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn't spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by being forced to focus on my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away. By the end of that second week, I realized that since I'd begun my hike, I hadn't shed a single tear.

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. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn't a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before.

For once I didn't ache for a companion. For once the phrase a woman with a hole in her heart didn't thunder into my head. That phrase, it didn't even live for me anymore.

What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What

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. The

I was not going to nod. Everything that had ever happened to me in my whole life was mixed into the cement that kept my head perfectly still

Because in your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

Someone was in here. It was me. I was here. I felt it in a way I hadn't in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.

I'm sorry," she said and reached over and squeezed his leg. She couldn't help but think that she'd ruined his life. It didn't yet occur to her to wonder about having ruined her own.

I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail this darkly.