Quotes About Introspection

You'll be much more impressive if you stay silent and mysterious.

but he wondered how many others had seen the loneliness in her expression when she wasn't guarding it.

She felt so alone. She felt as if her life had gone into a kind of hibernation, as if part of her were asleep and maybe dreaming the rest. She let herself be passive; she accepted whatever happened.

Slit my skull open. Know what it'll be like? Like slitting open the guts of a great white shark. Stuff'll come out like you wouldn't fucking believe.

I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.

I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!

So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family's dinner.

It's human to have a secret, but it's just as human to reveal it sooner or later.

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself

This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself.

Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, Why are things the way they are? Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect? Why are things the way they are? The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn't even know the question existed.

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist's success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a "narcissist," but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?

My God, he thought, the man I once was! The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No otherness to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being.

For all that I announce at intervals that I want to go mad, it is apparently impossible: beyond me, beneath me. It took This for me to learn that I am a citadel of sanity.

True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it - either that or you were sunk. You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.

The music I play after dinner is not a relief from the silence but something like its substantiation: listening to music for an hour or two every evening doesn't deprive me of the silence — the music is the silence coming true.

I can't really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don't give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted." "Everything is acted." "Whatever. With me there's some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don't have. My life never seems real to me.

Don't tell me he's bisexual! Don't tell me this is more of the guy in the hallway! Don't tell me he wants us to have it off together, Philip Roth fucking Philip Roth! That, I'm afraid, is a form of masturbation too fancy even for me.

In short, dozens of conflicting, truncated impressions were already teasing to be understood, but the wisest course seemed to me to keep them to myself so long as I didn't begin to know what they added up to.

I don't know anybody. I turn sentences around, and that's it.

Gogol, Kafka y compañía… va a tener serios problemas si sigue por ese camino.

Can anyone be utterly without thoughtfulness? The answer is yes.

Exhibitionismul inerent unei marturisiri nu face decat sa agraveze suferinta.