Quotes About Introspection

Oh God, what's wrong with me? Why does nothing ever work out?

where you swallowed a terrible silence.

Who I am remains to be seen— and I alone intend to be the one to see it.

I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger.

Do we identify with a criminal in that we too secretly long to be judged? Popularly, being 'judgemental' is ill thought of and resented. But what if we want our deeds, our natures, our very souls to be summed up and evaluated? A line to be drawn under our acts to date? A punishment declared, amends made, the slate wiped clean? A born-again Christian, trying to explain his new sense of freedom, once said to me, "All my debts are paid".

How on earth could he not see it? It stood on the wooden floor behind him, in the corner just inside the door, where the light from the hallway poorly fell: an old-fashioned alarm clock with three blunt stumps for legs and a bell like a Prussian helmet. Its face, a faithful little moon, was turned up to her, its hands were spread to plead innocence, and its inner mechanism emitted without ceasing the rapid ribbon of blows called the passing of time.

the poetic moment is a static one. It's watching through a window while the action happens elsewhere. And then the poet turns away from the window because the poem is done ... It cannot unflinchingly stare grief down. At some point, by necessity, or design, it must turn away.

What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I am in, therein to be content.

By seeing ourselves honestly, we have the capacity to understand others more deeply.

The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane.

That I have remembered what it is, and how it can be done. But watching television from the sofa later that evening I notice tears running from my eyes and dropping into my mug of tea. Odd, I think. I put it down to tiredness. Perhaps I am getting a cold. Perhaps

For weeks I felt I was made of dully burning metal.

concentrating on the sodden lake of the heart, and its sharp depths / ... I am balanced on one foot, assuming the next step is groundward ('Walking')

You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to 'tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment'. Such a feat of imaginative recreation has always come easily to me. Too easily. It's part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching.

I can't help but think of a line written by the poet Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude.

Would that be dangerous, to not look while being looked at?

I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.

First you try to find a reason, try to understand what you've done so wrong so you can be sure not to do it anymore. After that you look for signs of a Jekyll and Hyde situation, the good and the bad in a person sifted into separate compartments by some weird accident. Then, gradually, you realize that there isn't a reason, and it isn't two people you're dealing with, just one. The same one every time.

She doesn't want to see anyone. She's happy like that, I think. Always relieved at the end of a visit.

In a psychomantium glass topples darkness. Things appear as they really are, people appear as they really are. Visions are called from a point inside the mirror, from a point inside the mind.

I looked inside my typewriter. There's a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants.

She wants to see good hearts and good brains put to proper use, but I'm not convinced that everybody ought to live like that, or even that everybody can.

Bisi, how could you, now? You know that when you pray, you are heard, if not by God, then by yourself. When you pray, you tell yourself what you truly want, what you really need. And once you know these things, you can do nothing but go after them. Sae you understand?