Quotes About Introspection

It just makes me a person that's really exhausted a couple other ways to live, you know? And really taken them, taken them to their conclusion. Which for me was a pink room, with no furniture and a drain in the center of the floor.

Fiction's about what it is to be a f*****g human being.

the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.

Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

he cannot close his eyes without being subjected to the diplopic double image of his lover's steady, supplicating and aging (!?) eyes, and then his own eyes vertical above her, darting from side to side, more concerned with how he is seen than with what he sees.

But the point was that I realized, on some level, that whatever a potentially 'lost soul' was, I was one -- and it wasn't cool or funny.

Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.

The terminal has that too-suddenly-hushed feeling of the moment after loud music stops.

un gran porcentaje de las cosas de las que suelo estar automáticamente seguro resultan ser completamente erróneas y fruto de engañarme a mí mismo.

If his young companions have their own special delusions—D.L.'s that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive, Sternberg's that a body is a prison and not a shelter—Mark's is that he's the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world. It's a solipsistic delusion.

Sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and hurt.

Nipples like pencil erasers, hard and corrective against wide shallow breasts whose broad curves I know like the Lake's own tired sweep.

It is unimaginably hard to do this—to live consciously, adultly, day in and day out.

Mark has been more comfortable with the general drift of a conversation before, lots of times. What if the stories that really stab him are really other people's stories? What if they're bullshit? What if he alone isn't clued into this, and there's no way to know ?

My feelings just started to change. It wasn't all him. It took time, but after time passed I felt something was missing, and I'm selfish, I can only feel like I'm giving more than I'm getting for so long, then things change.

Self-acceptance always precedes genuine self-surrender and self-transformation.

Genuine self-knowledge begins by looking at God and noticing how God is looking at us.

Believe me—I spent some uncomfortable moments with my head that morning. Because I'd read The Rolling Stones fifteen years before—and forgotten it completely. Or had I?

Mom says that the music is my way of trying to get close to Dad. But she's wrong. The music isn't my way of getting close to Dad or anyone. It's my way of getting away from both of them and going somewhere else. Someplace where things always resolve in the final eight bars.

the proper study of humanity is humanity itself. History is not just old news. It's people.

There are people who read books and there are people that make noise.

Why worship God when you can worship yourself? says the "celebrity.

The trick was to live here without hating yourself because all around you was hatred.

People appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids.