Quotes About Introspection

It seems to her that your family is at once utterly familiar and entirely unknown.

Don't you ever realise, said Helen, that the way we live is unlike the way other people live? On the whole I should have thought that was cause for satisfaction.

Sandra stood by, quietly amused: she wore a sugar pink track suit with matching plastic hairslides in the shape of elephants. Edward could see quite clearly behind her shoulder, like the aura visible to spiritualists, the woman she would be in thirty years time. There is probably nothing to be done about people, he thought, nothing at all, nor ever has been: processed, from the cradle to the grave. Most neither know nor care, which makes it worse.

It was as though she had some alter ego who told her she did not belong here. But she had never known anywhere else, and where else could there be?

And I am forty-nine and getting old and soon it will be too late for all the things I know nothing of but which torment me in the middle of the night and here now in this place which is supposed to be a comfort and a solace. I am lonely and hungry and I have never breathed a word of this to anyone. Nobody knows or cares. I don't want anyone to know or care.

Reading in old age for me is doing what it has always done--it frees me from the closet of my own mind.

Calm down, she tells herself. Just because this has never happened to you before. Because you have reached the ripe age of thirty-one without knowing this peculiar derangement. For derangement is what it surely is; only by stern physical effort can she keep herself from looking at him, touching him.

Her face, suddenly, contorts. The lips pinch and tighten. A hand crawls across the sheet. Lisa says, 'Are you all right?' 'No, says Claudia. 'But who is?

Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.

Sometimes thoughts merely pass through a man's head without mishap, but sometimes they fall out of his mouth on the way through.

Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive.

The sunset of all emotions, myself yellowing, subdued to grey sadness in my external self-awareness

A bitter awareness that everything is a sensation of mine and at the same time something external, something not in my power to change. Ah, how often my own dreams have raised up before me as things, not to replace reality but to declare themselves its equal

A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with eyes half-closed...I want no more from life than my dreams and this...It doesn't seem much? I don't know. What do I know about what is little and what is a lot?

Dac? ar putea s? gândeasc?, inima s-ar opri.

Everyone and everything oppresses me, chokes and maddens me; I am troubled by a crushing physical sense of other people's lack of comprehension.

These of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is.

What have we done?' he asked, but there was no one to answer him.

I used to think I knew all the answers. Then I thought I knew maybe a few of the answers. Now I'm not even sure I understand the questions. Nobody knows anything.

So we may use our books to form a barricade against the world, interweaving their words with our own to ward off the heat of the day.

lonely and isolated people who feel their solitude more intensely within the busy life of the streets. They are what George Gissing called the anchorites of daily life, who return unhappy to their solitary rooms.

Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirrored on every page