Quotes About Introspection

She sat in her chair, eyes closed. She liked to be the last one to leave. She despised crowds, and their opinions as they left a performance, or worse, discussed the wait for the bathroom or where do you want to eat. It spoiled her mood. She was still in that other world, she would stay there as long as she possibly could, the parallel channels twining and tunneling through her cortex like coral.

Wasn't that the way it always was? You didn't know, you couldn't tell, you just let it happen... Perhaps they didn't know themselves. Sometimes the line was very fine.

their eager eyes unlocking the secrets of the human form. who could just look at it as it is, without prettying it up or emphasizing its awfulness

I would rather live out on the desert alone, like an old prospector. All I needed was a small water source. What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.

You imagine you can see me, Mother? All you could ever see was your own face in a mirror." "Who am I, Mother? I'm not you. That's why you wish I were dead. You can't shape me anymore.

The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box.

At times like this I surprise myself, how I've managed to create something of a life on this foggy shore out of the broken pieces of myself, scavenged from the sea like flotsam. Or is it jetsam…it irks me not to know the difference.

Things touched Claire. Maybe too much, but at least they touched her. She couldn't twist things around in her mind, make the ends come out right.

don't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live underneath them.

I wasn't beautiful anymore. Now I looked like what I was, a raw wound.

She's never where she is. She's only inside her head.

You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.

That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He'd have had to change his whole philosophy. The

I learned, whatever you hung from my earlobes or out on my back, I was insoluble, like same in water. Stir me up, I always rest on the bottom

Loneliness was the human condition, I had to get used to it.

She's never where she is," I said. "She's only inside her head.

How did I get so lost? Mother

I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other. One

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness.

I was the center of my own universe, it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around me, and I liked the way he looked at me.

She closed the magazine and stared at the girl on the cover, a girl who had never been pregnant, never had a social worker or a filling. Yvonne stroked the water-wavy cover. I could tell, she wanted to know what that girl knew, feel how she felt, to be so beautiful, wanted, confident. Like people touching the statue of a saint.

She grew more and more silent about what really mattered. She curled inside herself like one of those black chimney brushes, the little shellfish you see on the beach, and you touch them, and then go inside and don't come out.

there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

Well, Elizabeth, I said to myself, you certainly have a lot to learn.