Quotes About Introspection

ponderously

Siri, am I doing the right thing?

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and

Only humankind struggles and fails in becoming what it is. The reasons are many and complex, but all stem from the fact that we have evolved as one of the self-seeing organs of the evolving universe. Can the eye see itself?

We all retreat into ourselves in some way.

Reading had always been another world for him. Not an escape, since he rarely sought escape ... writers had to confront the world if they were going to observe it accurately ... but another world nonetheless. One filled with powerful voices relaying even more powerful thoughts.

In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.

Richard, said Dave, do you ever wonder how much of your life you've spent trying to please the dead?

Everyday is filled with opportunities to take a quiet moment

I'm curious how someone...finds God, or solace, or peace or whatever it is he finds out here alone...while he's reciting words. Is it just a matter of believing what you say?

Sometimes I think I have organized the inner crowd. For a brief, breathtaking moment, I feel completely whole. I understand that I am composed of many selves that make up a single chorus. To listen to the music this chorus makes, to recognize it as music, as something noble, varied, patterned, sublime--that is the work of a lifetime.

It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself.

I have been writing all my life. Growing up, I wrote in soft-covered journals, in spiral-bound notebooks, in diaries with locks and keys. I wrote love letters and lies, stories and missives. When I wasn't writing, I was reading. And when I wasn't writing or reading, I was staring out the window, lost in thought. Life was elsewhere-I was sure of it-and writing was what took me there.

Do you know the three great spiritual questions? he asked...Who am I?...Why am I here?...And how shall I live?

From Carl Jung: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate." —

Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

Christopher Bollas, writes: "There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.

I've learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I'm doing. I've discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue...

I believe he doesn't regret it. But still, has being with me stopped him from being him?

ritual that allows me to enter a contemplative place—a place in which I might come upon something wordless and profound. Maybe the rituals are a doorway to prayer. But I spent most of my life confusing them with prayer itself.

Sometimes I think I have organized the inner crowd. For a brief, breathtaking moment, I feel completely whole. I understand that I am comprised of many selves that make up a single chorus. To listen to the music this chorus makes, to recognize it as music, as something noble, varied, patterned, beautiful — that is the work of a lifetime.

The constitutional disease from which I suffer," wrote the philosopher and psychologist William James, "is what the Germans call Zerrissenheit, or torn-to-pieces-hood. The days are broken in pure zig-zag and interruption.

think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be," wrote Joan Didion in her essay "On Keeping a Notebook," "whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, and who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

late at night once