Quotes About Introspection

I have been trying to think clearly about everything and to use all this distance to advantage. And here is what I've discovered. I don't love you, Ishmael.

You've been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you're someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy.

He was a reader and recognized his habit of reading as obsessive and neurotic…

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

As Michael Cunningham would later write in his novel The Hours, I thought what I was feeling was the beginning of happiness. In fact, it was happiness.

Now I see -- we are always most revolted by the things hidden within us.

Sometimes it happens that a man's circle of horizon becomes smaller and smaller, and as the radius approaches zero it concentrates on one point. And then that becomes his point of view.

But all our wisdom had been vanity. I could no longer feel superior to

Hell isn't other people. It's other people telling the same story for the twentieth time.

The guilty are uncomfortable with silence.

Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

If we can't be ballplayers together, maybe I can start bein' a Buddhist.

Because I wasn't anything anymore. Not anythingI love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are--if doing this to others before they do it to us is all our lives are--we're already dead. Honest to God I feel it, Kade. I'm dead. The hell with me.

I didn't hurt anymore, didn't feel like hiding anymore, wasn't scared anymore. Because I wasn't anything anymore. Not anything I love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are - if doing this to others before they do it unto us is all our lives are - we're already dead.

Focusing inward on our misery traps us in our own private dungeon, and we lock ourselves away from those richer interiors that provide the healing and wisdom we need.

in his mind nearly everyone seemed to be noticing him in the same way that he was focusing on himself.

I never felt the urge to jump off a bridge, but there are times I have wanted to jump out of my life, out of my skin.

I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.

There has to be a moment at the beginning where you wonder whether you're in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself. If the moment doesn't pass, that's it—you're done. And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it's even there when you thought you were searching for something else, like an escape route, or your lovers' face.

Putting up with the fear of being with the wrong person because you can't deal with the fear of being alone.

I'm not good at relationships I always manage to find the flaws sometimes in others but mostly my own. I foretell the ending then go and create the cause save myself and end up alone

you'd think that silence would be peaceful. but really, it's painful.

underneath all that denial, you're someone who's deeply, deeply nice.

i wish i were someone else, even though i know i'll never, ever be able to get away from what i've done and what's been done to me.