Quotes About Introspection

Colin was beginning to be afraid(...)of the future, of the possibility, suddenly glimpsed, that his life might end like this. Like most young people, he'd always assumed, without ever really thinking about it, that regret, waste, failure lay in wait for others, but not for him. Now(...)he realized, for the first time, that he was not exempt, that this, unless he took steps to avoid it, could happen to him.

A flicker of fear, but it faded. The man looked round the room again, as if searching for something, but for something inside himself, Colin thought. For something he ought to feel, and couldn't.

The silence deepened, like a fall of snow, accumulating second by second, flake by flake, each flake by itself inconsiderable, until everything is transformed.

Why him? Why not me? He asks the questions over and over, as if one day they might have a different answer, and the burden of guilt be lifted at last.

It's strange, isn't it? You go on and on, or I do rather, seeing God knows what horrors and learning not to care or anyway not to care more than you need to do the job, and then something happens that gets right under your skin.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

Even then, her interior life was far more important to her than her external one.

She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.

It all makes more sense when I'm out here alone, he smiled. I can talk myself into anything.

I lit a cigarette and began puffing on it as I drank one quick beer after another. I was neither a drinker nor a smoker nor a fighter, but I had planned to be all three on this day.

The whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies. I had to start over again. I knew that. And I had to begin by ceasing to loathe myself for my difference from the rest.

Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me.

And each year, I lose a little bit more of what made me special as a kid. I don't think as much or question as much. I dare nothing. I put nothing on the line. Even my passions are now frayed and pathetic.

My irritation with Niles was growing, though. I had always thought the quiet man was the most overrated form of human life.

I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.

We Shall Overcome" by Pete Seeger. I remember that moment with crystal clarity and I comprehend it as a turning point in my life: a moment terrible in its illumination of a toad in my soul, an ugliness so pervasive that it seemed my insides were vomit.

You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy.

The mirror used to be my best friend. Now it is an assassin.

I was being cynical. I'm sorry. It's a family habit I've fallen prey to.

Who else would I take as prisoners of my high sanctity before my life was over?

By not being able to tell me anything about themselves, they were telling me everything.