Quotes About Introspection

What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?

She sometimes found herself standing in the barn watching her fowl pecking the seed, feeling happy until she realised she wasn't.

and before tomorrow was coming to an end, he knew his mind would already be working in much the same way, yet again, over the day that was to follow.

What it is to be a man,' she said, 'and to have days off.

Value people because of who they were deep down, not because of their names or their parents' clout.

Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have -- that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding.

It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate.

Once aware of my isolation, I was afraid not of it but of its interruption.

He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it

The most striking aspect of Jane's adult letters is their defensiveness. They lack tenderness towards herself as much as towards others ... They are the letters of someone who does not open her heart'. They are also, perhaps, the letters of someone who doesn't dare open her heart, for fear of what she might find there.

Only with a clear mind will you be able to see who is truly in your heart.

A man has only one escape from his old self — to see a different self in the mirror of some woman's eyes.

I see something of a comrade in you. You like a book. Silent revelation on a page pleases you better than a self-bolstering display of verbal spillage. What do you see in me?

He was intrigued now, as when he had first met her, by her apparent lack of interest in him. 'Gertie, Gertie,' he said in humblest tones. 'I treated you badly.' She peered at him rather rudely, as if trying to recollect what he was talking about. 'You were a stage on a journey,' she commented at last. 'Journeys are seldom comfortable.

I've never killed a man, but I've read many an obituary with a great deal of satisfaction.

If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.

I am only true when I'm alone.

She was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her.

First of all, I must make it clear that this girl does not know herself apart from the fact that she goes on living aimlessly. Were she foolish enough to ask herself 'Who am I?', she would fall flat on her face. For the question 'Who am I?' creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need? To probe oneself is to recognize that one is incomplete.

She had no idea how to cope with life and she was only vaguely aware of her own inner emptiness. Were she capable of explaining herself, she might well confide: the world stands outside me. I stand outside myself.

I write very simple and very naked. That's why it wounds. I'm a grey and blue landscape. I rise in a dry fountain and in the cold light.

I don't want beauty, I want identity.

Could it be that the person who sees most, feels and suffers most?

I read what I'd written and thought once again: from what violent chasms is my most intimate intimacy nourished, why does it deny itself so much and flee to the domain of ideas? I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.