Quotes About Introspection

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

After I die, and you read something bad about yourself in my diary, do yourself a favor and keep reading," I often say to Hugh. "I promise that on the next page you'll find something flattering. Or maybe the page after that.

When visitors leave, I feel like an actor watching the audience file out of the theater, and it was no different with my sisters. The show over, Hugh and I returned to lesser versions of ourselves. We're not a horrible couple, but we have our share of fights, the type that can start with a misplaced sock and suddenly be about everything. "I haven't liked you since 2002," he hissed during a recent argument over which airport security line was moving the fastest.

It's always so satisfying when you can twist someone's hatred into guilt--make her realize that she was wrong, too quick to judge, too unwilling to look beyond her own petty concerns.

You'd have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to know what you're getting yourself into, so if there's blame, blame yourself.

I like the kind of man John is. He watches things closely and then does nothing with the information.

Other people's pain is uninteresting. My own, though, is spellbinding.

I looked from face to face, exaggerating flaws and reminding myself that these boys did not like me. The hope was that I might crush any surviving atom attraction, but as has been the case for my entire life, the more someone dislikes me the more attractive he becomes.

After a year, you realize it takes time to rail against injustice, time you might better spend questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn't afford. Unless, of course, social injustice is you thing, in which case- knock yourself out. The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can't. Won't people turn away if they know the real me? you wonder.

Perhaps I've grown less likable over the years, or maybe I've just forgotten how to meet people. The initial introduction — the shaking-hands part — I can still manage. It's the follow-up that throws me. Who calls whom, and how often? What if you decide after the second or third meeting that you don't really like this person? Up to what point are you allowed to back out? I used to know these things, but now they're a mystery.

Having spent my life trying to fit the will of others, I was unable to distinguish between what I enjoyed and what I thought I should enjoy.

How does someone undress you with his eyes when you're already undressed?" I asked. "By that point what's he looking at, your soul?

Hugh claims the reason I've never seen one is that I'm not perceptive enough. This is his way of telling me that I'm self-centered, suggesting that if I weren't so concerned about, for example, meeting my daily Fitbit goal, I'd realize there's a six-hundred-year-old milkmaid living in our silverware drawer.

There's something about picking the psychic apart that I don't like. It's cynical and uninteresting.

Like many good biography subjects, she became a mess toward the end of her life.

And there's no point in me doing anything if I can't write about it," I continued. "It would be like . . . walking ten miles without my Fitbit on—a complete waste. I mean, I do do things I don't write about: I use the bathroom, I have sex, but I try to be quick about it.

A guy needs a place where he can gaze into the ocean and sort things out." It

She lit a cigarette and spent a moment identifying with the smoldering match.

In the end I decided the word was more about him than it was about me. But isn't it often that way? It's one thing for someone to describe you in print, to go through several drafts and, after careful consideration, choose the adjective

looked at her picture on Facebook and thought, Of course.

my family's asshole.

As for the ewe, she was still in meditation, her eyes clamped shut, repeating the code of thieves and charlatans and those who are good to themselves the world over. I have to do what I have to do, she said. I have to do what I have to do.

And there's no point in me doing anything if I can't write about it," I continued. "It would be like . . . walking ten miles without my Fitbit on—a complete waste. I mean, I do do things I don't write about: I use the bathroom, I have sex, but I try to be quick about it.

Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in doing so, throw down this lance I've been hoisting for the past sixty years.