Quotes About Introspection

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.

Real reading is a lonely activity.

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.

Rereading old books is the highest form of literary pleasure and instructs you in what is deepest in your own yearnings. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends. Imaginative literature is otherness and as such, alleviates loneliness.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.

In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked...

The disparity between what people said life was and what I knew it to be unnerved me at times, but I swore that nothing would ever make me say life should be anything...

My mother's eyes were incomprehensible; they were dark stages where dimly seen mob scenes were staged and all one ever sensed was tumult and drama, and no matter how long one waited, the lights never went up and the scene never was explained.

The number of substitutes for fine and clean thinking the world provides positively gnaws at one's vitals.

Remember, you are your own worst enemy.

We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts.

I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.

It's very difficult to feel contempt for others when you see yourself in the mirror.

There are places in my heart...where no living soul...has...or can ever...trespass.

What waits me on the shelves? I cannot guess, But feel the sure foreboding; there will cry A voice of human laughter and distress, A word that no one needs as much as I.

Jerry looked at me and then laughed. Jerry was no dunce. He knew what was on my mind. Jerry was a strange friend. He wasn't an easy one to make friends with; neither was he stuck-up. He was just—particular. I don't know why he liked me, but if I could see far enough ahead, if I could only have known what Jerry and I—but we'll get to it when we get to it. It's bad enough we can look back and remember; it would be a lot worse if we knew what was coming.

Perhaps they suspected that I thought less of them because I knew it. (I'm too aware of human frailty to have let that happen. If anything, I thought more of them for wanting to face up to what they had done and for trying to change.)

We can do our best to change people, to summon them to be whom they are capable of being, but ultimately they only people we will always have the power to change will be ourselves.

Many biblical verses are like inkblot tests, revealing more about us than about the text in question.