Quotes About Introspection

I don't see it as my role to save or rescue anybody any more than regular people feel the need to rescue each other from sleeping and dreaming.

understanding cannot be measured by external behavior

Me, feeling. What a concept.

But what could I do? Be stupid for a while? I wasn't sure I knew how, even after so many years of careful observation.

I rose to my knees, mouth dry and heart pounding, and paused to finger a rip in my beautiful Dacron bowling shirt. I pushed my fingertip through the hole and wiggled it at myself. Hello, Dexter, where are you going? Hello, Mr. Finger. I don't know, but I'm almost there. I hear my friends calling.

It's always me, isn't it? I'm not really a very nice person, but for some reason it's always me that they come to with their problems.

the faster it ran away from me. And I found myself reasoning that perhaps one more beer would unlock the doors of perception

Because no matter how far you may travel, you are what you are, and even when you are flying at thrilling new heights, circling the sun and thinking you belong in the halo of that perfect golden light, you do not. The wings always melt, and you always crash-land in your same old self.

Is that why you're crying? (...) It's just hormones, she said. I didn't want anyone to see. I skipped over the image of anyone seeing her hormones and tried to focus on the heart of the matter.

We all make rules for ourselves. It's these rules that help define who we are. So when we break those rules, we risk losing ourselves and becoming something unknown. Who is Deb now? Who am I? Is this a new beginning? Or the beginning of the end?

Oh," I said, and my eyes pop open to the fluorescent light of Deborah's office, and no matter how hard I try to push it away and find a way not to believe it, the things I saw do not change. Even in the harsh and ugly light of the office the picture is the same, and even worse, I now see Deb and Jackie staring at me uncertainly, as if they had been watching me urinate on a busy street. "Oh, um," I say. "It's, you know. I just thought of something.

I gave myself a stern lecture, told myself to buck up, play the man, be a mensch, do what must be done, and after several similar clichés I began to believe I could do it, but the thought of it still tickled at me.

Dexter the sofa spud ...

I knew I was supposed to understand that Rita was actually saying something very specific, that her pauses and stutters added up to a great and marvelous thing that a human male would intuitively grasp. But I had not a single clue as to what it might be, nor how to figure it out. Should I count the breaths? Time the pauses and convert the numbers to Bible verses to arrive at the secret code? What was she trying to tell me? And why, for that matter, was she trying to tell me anything at all?

Steady, Dexter, I thought. This is just a small, painful reminder of who you are and where you came from, brought on by stress. It has nothing to do with operatic cattle.

Deborah looked at me with a frown, and I frowned back. What Alana said made sense, of course, especially to someone untroubled by human feelings, like I used to be. It was clinically cold reasoning, serpentine but clear, and that certainly fit what we were coming to know about Alana. And yet—something was wrong with it, whether it was the way she said it or something else, I couldn't say; it didn't quite add up for me.

But why?" I said. And because I like to give as good as I get, I added, "Don't you like who you are?" The

Salvia divinorum

Cody sat and looked around him as if the world had gone mad and exploded into a hideous caterwauling din, and he was the only one left with a clear head and a sense of decency.

Cody stood looking up at Brian, his feet spread apart and his hands hanging stiffly at his sides. Their eyes locked together and I could hear the leathery unfolding of wings between them, the dark and sibilant greeting of twin interior specters. There was a look of belligerent wonder on Cody's face, and he just stared for a long moment and Brian stared back, and finally Cody looked at me. "Like me," he said. "Shadow Guy.

They didn't need to know a thing about me to decide that I had overstayed my time on planet Earth. I

I suppose that anyone with even a little bit of self-awareness will eventually feel like a complete hypocrite in the company of children, and this was my time.

Of all the odd thoughts I could have, that might seem the oddest, but there it was. Dexter was in a dither over doing what he does best, merely because it would be a rush job. Was my new life of luxury rotting away the hard and happy core of the monster that is me? Turning me into an old maid incapable of the simplest and most well-justified endings? Was I really so straitlaced?

I went through my reasoning again, checking it carefully, looking for any indications that I had added things up wrong, and found none. I was as sure as I could be, and that's always a nice feeling. If I lived through all this, I must remember to have that feeling more often.