Quotes About Introspection

You ought to get out more. You know, Pérol, we should go out some evening, just you and me. Otherwise, you lose touch with reality. You know what I mean? You lose your sense of reality, and hey presto, you don't know which shelf you left your soul on. The shelf where you put your friends. The shelf where you put your women. Stage right, stage left. Or in the shoebox. You turn around and you find you're stuck in the bottom drawer, with the accessories.

Of course, every new caress would only have taken us closer to the inevitable: break-ups, tears, disillusionment, sadness, anguish, loathing. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to the mess that human beings make of this world.

Does the cosmos contain keys for opening my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? We must keep looking.

Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories.

Sad state to spend your life in. Being afraid of your own self. Rex Walls, The Glass Castle

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.

I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.

the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.

Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.

You said, 'I'm going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.' I've hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?

Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.

Don't you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn't the mirror hostile enough?

When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.

Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives.

I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.

We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

I was never bored except in the company of others.