Quotes About Introspection

When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here.

All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything--the miracle--is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.

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

I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?

It is better to know it. Better to know who you are, and what lies in you, what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

If the demons lie within they travel with you. Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever reality we have chosen to believe in. . . . It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions, is to understand ourselves as fully as we can.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and them without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.

Unlike him she knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought then, to make the words fall out. But the words did not fall out and her feelings hung inside her, preserved.

The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

I need the dark places to get outside of common sense

I have come so far so fast that I haven't had time to ask whether or not this is where I want to be

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers.

The hard-bound space hides the vulnerable self.

I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning.

There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

Why do humans need answers? Partly I suppose because without one, almost any one, the question itself soon sounds silly.

I'm not afraid of what I am. I'm afraid I will see what I am not.

I am always wondering about love.

In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top with the phone saying 'Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine.' The trunks shudder

The cities of the interior are vast and do not lie on any map.