Quotes About Introspection

I long ago gave up defending humanity. It's beyond me on most days to defend myself.

And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

It's not that I have no shame. Rather, I'm exhausted with shame, slippery all over with its sticky albumen taint. It is not an emotion that leads anywhere.

Was our life together that unbearable?

This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen.

I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion, like stirring a crowded silverware drawer for the potato peeler, but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn't there. The potato peeler is always in the drawer after all. It's under the spatula, it's slipped into the fold of the food-processor guarantee -

Between ourselves, I've started to worry that in some backhanded way I've become attached to the disfigurement of my own life.

In fact, because the unself-aware—which includes basically everybody—are impervious to uncharitable perceptions of their underlying motives, all these insights you have into people and what makes them tick are surprisingly useless.

like that legendary journey that begins with a single step, I had already embarked upon my first resentment. A petty one, but most resentments are. And one that for its smallness I felt obliged to repress.

To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.

Should what you get up to fail to comport with who you think you are, something is surely inaccurate (and likely optimistic) about who you think you are.

The feeling was not of being attractive precisely, but rather of not having to entertain. It was breathtaking: to be ensconced in another person's company, yet to be relieved of the relentless minute-by-minute obligation to redeem one's existence - for there is some sense in which socially we are all on the Late Show, grinning, throwing off nervous witticisms, and crossing our legs, as a big hook behind the curtains lurks in the wings.

This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen.

La idea es conseguir que quien compra tu libro se sienta un poco menos infeliz porque ahora sabe que es un infeliz, a diferencia de todos los demás, que son tan infelices que ni siquiera saben que lo son.

Había sido incapaz de discernir si ese frenético ajetreo era lo que afirmaba ser, una ferviente determinación a vivir a tope cada uno de los días que le quedaban, o todo lo contrario, una evasión.

Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy.... I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu.

I have spent less time thinking about my husband than thinking about lunch.

I've found that people's generalizations are largely illuminating about themselves.

This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen. When I walk down the street, my experience is of looking. Manifest to myself in the ethereal privacy of my head, I grow alarmed when presented with evidence of my public body.

I was never shy. I was waiting to have something to say.

Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.

perhaps we have never been more than vocal and perhaps soon we can hope to be no more than thoughtful...

The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.

It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.