Quotes About Introspection

Troubled men both, he thinks, Wriothesley and Riche, and alike in some ways, sidling around the peripheries of their own souls, tapping at the walls: oh, what is that hollow sound?

So much has been said between them that it is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral.

Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you.

what's wrong with you? Or what's wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.

He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself.

Thomas Moro solía decir que uno debería construir un retiro, una ermita, dentro de su casa.

I listened to the murmurs within his silence. Construction can be put on silence.

For a month he is at home: he reads.

Thomas thinks, he was being unnecessarily Welsh.

We say, how did it happen? We ask ourselves." The duke sniffs. "We ask ourselves, but by the steaming blood of Christ we have no bloody answer." The steaming blood of Christ. It's an oath worthy of Thomas Howard, the senior duke.

Gardiner, he thinks. It may not be proper to call

One can learn from that, he thinks.

You start out, you start talking, you don't even know what you're going to say. You don't even know your way to the end of the sentence. You don't know anything. Then suddenly you do know you have to walk blind and you walk slap into the truth.

Maximilien, cerca di imparare questa verità», disse padre Herivaux, «gli uomini per la maggior parte sono pigri e ti valuteranno secondo la considerazione che tu hai di te stesso. Assicurati dunque che sia alta».

For a young reader that's an important moment, when you recognize that your self exists in the world and that your self exists in literature.

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

You wonder what else you have always believed, believed without foundation.

I am as I am and so will I be But how that I am, none knoweth truly Be it evil, be it well, be I bound, be I free, I am as I am and so will I be … … But how that is I leave to you. Judge as ye list, false or true Ye know no more than afore ye knew Yet I am as I am, whatever ensue.

The mind is its own best torturer.

Small, inquisitive and solitary, the only child of an only son, growing up in rented lodgings or hotel rooms, constantly on the move as a boy, Anthony Powell needed an energetic imagination to people a sadly under-populated world from a child's point of view. His mother and his nurse were for long periods the only people he saw, in general the one unchanging element in a peripatetic existence.

Every marriage is a mystery to me, even the one I'm in. So I'm no expert on it.

The first lesson I've learned is that no matter what you do in your life, you have to figure out your own internal rhythms - I mean, what works for you doesn't necessarily work for your friend.

The truth is that sometimes it is hard even for me to recognize the Hillary Clinton that other people see.

If I am not for myself, who is for me? And when I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?