Quotes About Introspection

I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he would begin to run. I knew this with my intuition, and yet I sat there in my dark room, looking at the hazed wet brilliance of the purple London night sky, longing with my whole being.

You have to deduce a person's real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth's corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.

Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

Each was changed in himself, and yet each thought the other only changed, himself the same.

And so it is with many people who casually live on the outer edge of their own souls until great thunderstorms of sorrow reveal hidden depths within, which were never before known or suspected

I never know what the hell I'm writing about, I never know what the next thing I'm writing about is, I never have a plan.

When it comes to true humility in the face of history, nothing beats complete silence.

We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.

You're all so obsessed with other worlds, you're so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you've never bothered to figure out what's going on here!

In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.

Sometimes he looked at her and thought, Gosh, I wonder what's underneath all that anger, all that hard glossy armor? Maybe there's just an innocent, wounded little girl in there who wants to come out and play and be loved and get happy. But now he wondered if maybe that little girl was long gone, or if she'd ever been there at all. What was under all that armor, all that anger? More anger, and more armor. Anger and armor, all the way down.

She was a person with her own hopes and feelings and history and nightmares. In her own way she was as lost as he was.

For a certain kind of person there is literally nothing nicer than eating breakfast by yourself on a moving train with a good book.

I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don't need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me.

Alone in his room, he smiled at his secret greatness.

But being in the middle of it, it wasn't that obvious.

This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself

Her depressive tendency, the flip side of her manic streak, was stirring. Why were they even doing this? it wanted to know. What a waste of time, of effort. Of pencils. Plum needed to get moving, but she was having trouble attaching meanings to things; the meanings kept peeling off like old stickers.

The higher you get the more you realize how much bigger than you everything is.

She started wearing black and listening to the Smiths and reading Camus

He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping an uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters.

There's no getting away from yourself. Not even in Fillory.

There were things he'd been scared to face his whole life, and now that he was looking them in the eye they weren't quite as scary as he first thought.