Quotes About Introspection

In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It was the light that shines in darkness calling me back into time.

but we didn't speak of what was bothering us the most. Maybe we didn't need to. It couldn't have been "talked out." It had to be worn out.

If I could have found in my mind a plain and simple way to be right, that would have been something. I would have been changed in another way, and my life ever afterward would have been different. But having reached the crisis—the crossroad, so to speak—I failed. I didn't have at all the feeling of being right.

You could say the place had a pious atmosphere. It was an atmosphere that I finally had to think about, and when I thought about it I had to admit that I could not get comfortable in it; I could not breathe a full breath in it.

We are in the habit of contention—against the world, against each other, against ourselves. It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.

Look in and see him looking out. He is not always quiet, but there have been times when happiness has come to him, unasked, like the stillness on the water that holds the evening clear while it subsides - and he let go what he was not.

All I needed was to be alone and quiet and in the dark, so that my mind could concentrate itself of fearful things, and it could not be unconcentrated sometimes until daylight.

It has always taken me a long time to think of something to say, and then more often than not I say it to myself.

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.

And of course Cecelia held some secret doubts about herself; you can't dislike nearly everybody and be quite certain that you have exempted yourself.

Though I knew that actually I had heard no voice, I could not dismiss the possibility that it had spoken and I had failed to hear it because of some deficiency in me or something wrong that I had done….I decided that I had better accept the call that had not come, just in case it had come and I had missed it.

Over the years he seemed to have shrunk, trying to make himself invisible to Ivy, or maybe to God.

I had heard it all before—most of us had—but John T. had never heard any of it, because he usually didn't listen to anybody but himself. He was shocked. For almost a full minute, Sam having spoken to his satisfaction and John T. unable to speak at all, they just looked at each other.

All friends and comfortable with each other have ceased to talk, each occupied in that wide quiet with his own thoughts.

a place where thought can take its shape as quietly in the mind as water in a pitcher...

I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to learn.

Theoretically, there is always a better place for a person to live, better work to do, a better spouse to wed, better friends to have. But then this person must meet herself coming back: Theoretically, there always is a better inhabitant of this place, a better member of this community, a better worker, spouse, and friend than she is. This surely describes one of the circles of Hell, and who hasn't traveled around it a time or two?

Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters' as well as the author's), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.

PROLOGUE: WHY I READ It's not a question I can completely answer. There are abundant reasons, some of them worse than others and many of them mutually contradictory. To pass the time. To savor the existence of time. To escape from myself into someone else's world. To find myself in someone else's words. To exercise my critical capacities. To flee from the need for rational explanations. And even the obvious

But there was no final firestorm, just a long night of negotiations where we tried to get our old selves back, to disown who we'd been for the past three months, because we'd been the wrong people all along.

I didn't think so much of him at first. But now I get it: he's everything that I'm not.

I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.

The tiny lines extending from the corners of his eyes were no illusion. He touched his cheek and felt a delicate dryness, a subtle stiffening. Weren't there also circles under his eyes, and even more lines around his mouth?

The truly terrible thing about this life, was not knowing what you want, but only able to recognize what you do not want. You have to spend so much time and energy trying to find it out, time that other people spent in pursuing of their desires.