Quotes About Introspection

I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. "You

Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do 'something', that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I'm not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun.

My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.

and had a mauvais quart d'heure wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television.

Jeder Augenblick geschieht zweifach: innen und außen, und es sind zwei unterschiedliche Geschichten.

A mortifying sense of porousness.

And even before he said it, he wondered why he had to, why he felt so malevolent this evening.

Maybe I have thought intellect more important than faith. And now it seems this final temptation has been put in front of me.

Well, we can say that Aimee lives in her bubble, he said, interrupting me, and so does your friend and, by the way, so do you. It's possible that it's like this for everyone. The size of the bubble is different, this is all. And perhaps the thickness of the--what do you call this in English?--skin--film. The thin layer on a bubble.

mainly that it was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case.

In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first twenty pages in particular bring on heart palpitations. It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.

She wanted to check that it was not her imagination, that she was not being unfair or undemocratic, or worse still racist (but she had read Colour Blind, a seminal leaflet from the Rainbow Coalition, she had scored well on the self-test), racist in ways that were so deeply ingrained and socially determining that they escaped her attention.

Now, every time I learn something more about him, I like him less. So you see, we were better off the way we were.

Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

There's no woodland or forest-like aspect but it does feel like the middle of something, and wisdom finally arrives, even if only as an awareness that inside the adult flesh cages lurk the exact same children.

Yet a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses—a world consisting only of thrusting, vigorous men walking boldly out of frame—will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion.

Those who read Middlemarch in that way will find little in Their Eyes Were Watching God to please them. It's about a girl who takes some time to find the man she really loves. It is about the discovery of self in and through another.

Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do "something," that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I'm not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don't experience your self as 'natural' or 'inevitable' – as so many other people seem to do – and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages.

He] looked troubled, for he had strayed too far from small talk right to the center of things--it happened more and more these days--and now must try to return to the things that didn't matter.

He peered down the hallway at the shadowy form of Joyce through the glass and scratched his testicles, sadly.

I felt I was losing track of my physical location, rising above my body, viewing my life from a very distant point, hovering over it.