Quotes About Introspection

What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.

Philosophical involvement blinded me to authentic human fact.

Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.

My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression

I think, Dr. Stone said, that when you tried to kill yourself you got in touch with reality for the first time.

No one, it appeared to Barney, had anything to do now; the weight of empty time hung over them all.

I didn't get anything from holding onto those handles," Rick said. "Mercer talked to me but it didn't help. He doesn't know any more than I do. He's just an old man climbing a hill to his death." "Isn't that the revelation?" Rick said, "I have that revelation already.

Consciousness of unconsciousness

The surveillance, he thought, essentially should be maintained. And, if possible, by me. I should always be watching, watching and figuring out, even if I never do anything about what I see; even if I just sit there and observe silently, not seen: that is important, that I as a watcher of all that happens should be at my place.

Maybe I'll just sit here parked for a while, he decided, and alpha meditate or go into various different altered states of consciousness.

We peep out, but what do we see, really? Mirror reflections of our own selves, our bloodless, feeble countenances, devoted to nothing in particular, insofar as I can fathom it. Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.

Who threw the stone at me? he asked himself. No one. But why does it bother me? I've undergone it before, during fusion. While using my empathy box, like everyone else. This isn't new. But it was. Because, he thought, I did it alone.

Don't you feel it?" he kidded her. "The historicity?

But the longing within him had grown even greater, the overpowering need to be alone. Locked in an empty room, entirely unwitnessed, silent and supine. Stretched out, not needing to speak, not needing to move. Not required to cope with anyone or any problem. And no one will even know where I am, he told himself. That seemed, unaccountably, very important; he wanted to be unknown and invisible, to live unseen.

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses . . . what do they think?

What if he could see this, his own skull, yellow and eroded? Two centuries old. Would he still speak? Would he speak, if he could see it, the grinning, aged skull? What would there be for him to say, to tell the people? What message could he bring? What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull?

When I was a child I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. Now I must seek in other realms.

And who am I? The wrong person; I can tell you that.

With him inside the elevator descended.

Maybe—after 14 months all I really know is that I don't know anything except that it happened to me, and what I saw during that short time was real. That's

I can't dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don't want to dial, I don't want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine; I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor.

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly?

I'm not much but I'm all I have.

One seeks to contravene one's perceptions - why? So that one can wander utterly lost, without signposts or guide?