Quotes About Introspection

You feel even more naked and alone, he said silently, when you reveal yourself, a gratuitous act, for the strength and comfort you look for, any of those last illusions of consolations, can finally be only within you.

That men at some time are masters of their fates was no longer merely a famous quotation. The idea haunted him, continually taunting him to confront it, but his mind responded only dully, in slow ineffective spasms. He did not know whether he should resign himself to his world, and to the rhythm that, living as we do, is imposed upon us, or whether he should believe in the mere words of an ancient Hindu poem, which held that action was better than inaction.

Don't go searching for the Dhamma outside, for it lies within. Peace lies within, but we have to contemplate so that we're aware all around—subtly, deep down.

So he went on, tearing up all the flowers from the garden of his soul, and setting his heel upon them.

O I'm babbling.

it only occurred to me much later that the summer I was fourteen I had saved a life--not the life of a stranger as I had imagined--but the life I had taken for granted and which, in the years to come, I would take for granted again.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.

She didn't look any older, so far as she could tell from the mirror, but her heart felt like somebody had been scraping the last bits out with a spoon.

I can never really enjoy being famous.

No it ain't nothing left to say. —Oddisee, "Tomorrow Today

I am waiting outside in the darkness making myself ready for when I go in. So I am thinking as many good thing I can think because if you are thinking good thing, nothing bad is happening to you.

He watches Meredith toss her long brown hair over her shoulder so that we can see the single diamond stud suspended just beneath her collarbones on a thin gold chain. She rolls it between her fingers and it makes her look delicate and pretty. Rowan thinks she does it to look pretty because he thinks all women do all things to look either pretty or fuckable. He has always though Meredith pretty. Now he thinks her fuckable.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.

What else but a profound feeling of being excluded can enable a person better to see the absurdity of the world and his own existence, or, to put it more soberly, the absurd dimensions of the world and his own existence?

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

Men love because they are afraid of themselves, afraid of the loneliness that lives in them, and need someone in whom they can lose themselves as smoke loses itself in the sky.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

The writer is all alone.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

So here is the greatest irony of all: that the self that almost by definition is entirely private is to significant extent a social construct.

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.