Quotes About Introspection

In this instance, he was wise enough to be suspicious of his own desire to seem wise, and to refuse to indulge in it….my father understood that advice - even wise advice - actually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complications of his own situation and path.

The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me. Instead of paying attention to what's going on inside me.

other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.

I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am...self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests...but then I countenance the fact here at least here I am worrying about it; so then I feel better about myself...but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling superior to imagined Others...I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am--so where does that put me.

This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as—what I knew was that I worried a lot

I wonder if anyone feels as though they're the same person they seem to remember. It would make them have a nervous breakdown. It probably wouldn't even make sense. I don't know if this is enough. I don't know what anybody else has told you.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.

The fact is that we're all lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it's almost a cliché.

I think serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult in ourselves and in the world.

and David Wallace blinks in the midst of idly scanning class photos from his 1980 Aurora West H.S. yearbook and seeing my photo and trying, through the tiny little keyhole of himself, to imagine what all must have happened to lead up to my death in the fiery single-car accident he'd read about in 1991...

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

So if we think about ourselves with respect to the game, we're thinking about our thinking. And we decided the one thing we couldn't think about was our thinking, because the object has to be Other. We can think only the things that can't think themselves. So if we think ourselves, see for instance conceiving ourselves as thought, we can't ourselves be the object of our thinking.

Estas mañanas peores con suelos fríos y ventanas calientes y luz despiadada...con la certidumbre en el alma de que ese día no será atravesado sino más bien escalado verticalmente que cuando al final vaya a dormir será otra vez como si cayera desde algún sitio alto y escarpado.

It takes a big man to laugh at himself, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.

Ä°ki genç bal?k,beraberce suda yüzüyormuÅŸ. Kar??dan gelen yaÅŸl?ca bir bal??a rastlam??lar;yaÅŸl?ca bal?k onlara bir baÅŸ selam? vererek ÅŸöyle demiÅŸ:Günayd?n çocuklar.Su nas?l? Genç bal?klar yüzmeye devam etmiÅŸ ama bir süre sonra biri diÄŸerine dönüp sormuÅŸ:Su da neyin nesi?

For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

the being struck dumb. It's like some combination of invisibility and being buried alive, in terms of the feeling. It's like being strangled somewhere deeper inside you than your neck.

It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.

La verità ti renderà libero. Ma solo quando avrà finito con te.

A big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves … I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction's job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it.