Quotes About Introspection

this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

Y cuando volvió en sí, estaba echado de espaldas en una playa sobre la arena muy fría y caía la lluvia de un cielo bajo y la marea estaba lejana.

soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

Ma poi si arriva al punto che... cioè, se quella persona arrivi ad amarla, allora è come se la faccenda si capovolgesse. Cioè non è più che apprezzi quella persona per via di certi aspetti di quella persona; piuttosto è che cominci ad apprezzare gli aspetti di quella persona perché apprezzi la persona. Tipo come una cosa centrifuga anziché centripeta.

In short that 99% of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.

I was one of the men in this room, the only one wearing a wristwatch who never once glanced at it. What looked just like glasses were not. I was wired from stem to stern.

What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting.

I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything. I

masturbating but did not. He didn't reject the idea so much

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.

One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there's pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely. It's

Hal's brooding. 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.

There's not any real forwardness to it. You don't sense it's straining to get anywhere. The thing it makes you see as she reads is something heavy swinging slowly at the end of a long rope.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race.

Empecé a desesperarme. Empecé a sentir que me quedaría colgado de esa terapia, que nunca hallaría la respuesta y que el asunto no tendría fin. Que tendría esos interfaces kafkianos con este hombre día tras día, semana tras semana. Ya era mayo.

Julie le ha dicho a Faye que cree que los amantes pasan por tres fases distintas cuando empiezan a conocerse bien. Primero intercambian anécdotas y gustos. Después se cuentan las cosas en que creen. Y luego cada uno examina la relación entre lo que el otro dice que cree y lo que hace en realidad.

The inactive viewer's screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight down on a cold day.

My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X.

try looking in the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else you know is good-looking or not—but

The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes..?

lo más peligroso que tiene la educación académica, por lo menos en mi caso, es que habilita mi tendencia a intelectualizar las cosas en exceso, a perderme en el pensamiento abstracto en lugar de limitarme a prestar atención a lo que está pasando delante de mí. Y en lugar de prestar atención a lo que está pasando dentro de mí.

Still, though. Right. Exactly.

when all the like props and stage-settings that let you just go around smugly assuming you're not a thing are ripped away and broken because all of a sudden now the world understands you as a thing, everybody else thinks you're a rat or a thing and now it's up to you, you're the only one that can decide if you're more.

La vostra preoccupazione per ciò che gli altri pensano di voi scompare una volta che capite quanto di rado pensano a voi.