Quotes About Introspection

Solitary people make the best travellers

Ambassador Noyes had another trait I had noticed in many slow-witted people: he was tremendously interested in philosophy.

It seems to me that there is always something luminous in the face of a person in the act of reading.

I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about.

And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward.

Normal, nice people don't become writers.

I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is. After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.

I was tumbling down the side of a dark star.

was questioning one of the cardinal precepts of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.

The recluse, the shunner of fame, the "I just want to be alone" escapee—B. Traven was one, so was J. D. Salinger—seems perversely to invite intrusion.

spent the rest of the morning in the gardens on my own, loving the solitude

It is often the case that only when someone asks you very specific questions do you begin to think clearly about your intentions.

It was Muriel Spark, in her novel Memento Mori: "If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

Sometimes a whispered word, or a single image or glimpse of humanity, can be a powerful motivation for looking deeper into the world.

Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.

And I began writing, to console myself in my solitude and to ease the passing of time.

he was turning sixty-two, not an age of life-altering shocks but only of subtle diminishments.

This is eloquent but tentative, self-deceiving, and hedging the bet.

We walk through ourselves," Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, summing up the travel experience, "meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

I had felt myself not merely incapable of love . . . but even of guilt.

the subject of boredom.

Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I.

One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy—at the time, not afterwards. Most people don't realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happiness. Their enjoyment takes the form of reminiscence, and it is always tinged with regret that they had not known at the time how happy they were. But I knew, and my memory (of bad times too) was detailed and intense.

All serious travelers arrive at this doubting, why-bother juncture, stalling on the road, sometime or other.