Quotes About Introspection

and wondered when it was, the exact moment, that I had lost her, that I let her fall too far away from me, that I betrayed the laughing girl and let the world have her. The photograph cut into my heart and I began to read the letter aloud.

As Tradd approached me I turned my back toward him and found myself facing an antique mirror that reflected our three images in tarnished

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

I realized that words were sometimes nothing more than notes you wrote to your deepest self as you fought to articulate the splendor and the magic and the ineluctable sense of loss that you felt in the swift, disturbing hours.

realized his wounds had enhanced his manhood and his own sense of himself.

Randy felt relieved. He looked out over the river, contemplating his ignorance of women and the peace of evening.

One of the greatest dangers we face in our attempt to remain humble is that the very moment we notice we are humble, we become proud of our humility- and in that instant, our humility evaporates

Everything is sorrow for the wise.

He could pick my heart like a rose and watch it wither in his hand. Sometimes I think he is like that. At other times I think he is as simple and golden and generous as our father's fields. And then I see things in his eyes - things that I have never looked at, and I know that I have walked a short and easy road out of my past, while he has walked a thousand roads to meet me. I know Perrin's past; the same road runs into his future. I don't know Corbet.

Research the imagination. It was as obsolete as the appendix in most adults, except for those in whom, like the appendix, it became inflamed for no reason.

He went into a dark tower of truth for you. Do you have the courage to give him your own name?

He had, she realized slowly, a gift for silence. When he chose, it seemed to ebb out of him, the word silence of old trees or stones lying motionless for years. It was measured to his breathing, in his motionless, scarred hands. He moved abruptly, soundlessly, and it flowed with him as he turned...

The human world is a cold and bitter place: nothing lasts in it. You must know that by now…. What did you imagine you were doing in those two rooms? Trying to turn yourself human?" "Yes," Corbet said, so simply that for a breath he rendered his father incapable of moving.

Perhaps' could be spun endlessly into different tales; even telling herself all of them, she would still be none the wiser.

Where did you go?" "To Mirkon Forest. I sat tossing a stone in my hand and learned nothing at all from it. Wine?

Then he was dragged out of flight, pulled again into the shrieking snarl of wind to stare into the empty eyes of the monster that saw nothing everywhere it looked, except when it looked at itself.

Gyre did not comment. She glanced at him, found an odd open, rueful expression on his face, as if he were looking inside and found himself lacking. It was unusual, she thought; his confidence seemed always unassailable. No one is unassailable, he said, shifting a branch in the fire with his bare hand. Then he turned his head quickly to meet her cold eye. I'm sorry. My thoughts were drifting; they floated into yours." Anchor them, she suggested drily. "I will try.

We have withdrawn into ourselves not out of horror, but out of a need to reconstruct the patterns we have called truth. In the very fabric of the realm, its settlement, history, tales, war, poetry, its riddles - if there is an answer there, a shape of truth that holds itself, we will find it.

Skepticism is luxury.

shouldn't be blaming

Jonah, being a writer, is a slow learner, stubborn, self-righteous, not given to trust [ Out of the Garden ].

Solitude provides the illusion—or is it the reality?—of a self. If I'm alone I can think dark thoughts, be real, be phony, try this, try that. Erase, contradict, forge ahead, double back.

in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of.

what is the foundation of contemplative life? 'Oh, she said, without a pause -- leisure, it's based on leisure.