Quotes About Introspection

In Gilead, the narrator's friend's son describes himself not as an atheist but in "state of categorical unbelief." He says, "I don't even believe God doesn't exist, if you see what I mean." I pointed this passage out to Mom and said it closely matched my own views--I just didn't think about religion.

Why did I always need to do something, like referring one person to another, just for the sake of doing something, when sometimes, perhaps, it was better to do nothing?

Mom went on to tell me, as we sat there, that she really believed your personal life was personal. Secrets, she felt, rarely explained or excused anything in real life, or were even all that interesting. People shared too much, she said, not too little. She thought you should be able to keep your private life private for any reason or for no reason.

Kokoro, a remarkable novel by Natsume Soseki,

We're all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.

Reading is the best way I know to learn how to examine your life. By comparing what you've done to what others have done, and your thoughts and theories and feelings to those of others, you learn about yourself and the world around you. Perhaps that is why reading is one of the few things you do alone that can make you feel less alone. It is a solitary activity that connects you to others.

Books focused her mind, calmed her, took her outside of herself;

don't like being interrupted either—but I interrupt other people. I often forget that other people's stories aren't simply introductions to my own more engaging, more dramatic, more relevant, and better-told tales, but rather ends in themselves, tales I can learn from or repeat or dissect or savor.

I consider the education of our senses and our emotions rather more important than the education of our ideas.

when you are running away from something, it often ends up coming with you, especially if the thing you are running away from is your own behavior.

it felt like I was headed right back to where I started—that once again I could lose everything I had, and that maybe I didn't deserve any of it. Maybe I had done something wrong.

stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

Surely it doesn't have to be this way? Stretching up the hill ahead of me, I begin to see all of my future relationships, bearing me on and up like some escalator of the fleshly. Each step is a man, a man who will penetrate me with his penis and his language, a man who will make a little private place with me, secure from the world, for a month, or a week, or a couple of years. How much more lonely and driven is the serial monogamist than the serial killer?

Sometimes I feel as if there's an explanation to my life that continues to escape me; that I've missed something noble, something sublime; that in some way I have cheated myself...life is so strange, so harsh.

She wrote that she, too, always felt an outsider "...even to myself.

Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

Creative nihilism, aggressive pity, total misanthropy.

Omdat men zal weten dat over de mens niets te bewijzen valt, dat er van hem in doen en laten, in wezen en verschijning, in heden en verleden, nog geen schim valt te bekennen van wat hij is en is geweest. Wij zijn niets anders dan de strandvonders van ons eigen leven, brokstukken verzamelend langs de zee der vergetelheid. In onze hand lopen wij met de verroeste spijkers van een groot, gezonken schip - en wij denken dat dit oudroest een horloge is.

Om integer te zijn en alleen te kunnen wezen, moet je iets ontdekken dat het de moeite waard maakt ervoor te lijden.

En zo kom je in de loop van de jaren (...) erachter dat je meestal niet jezelf bent, niet symmetrisch met jezelf, maar dat je het grootste deel van je leven in een aantal vreemde incarnaties bestaat voor welke je alle verantwoordelijkheid van de hand zou wijzen als je kon.

Toen zag hij een deur openstaan naar de enige plaats waar men zich altijd aan de wereld onttrekken kan. Niemand weet wie zich bevindt op een afgesloten wc.

Ik denk te veel. Het interesseert niemand. Mijn gedachten zitten in mij als sardines in een blik. Een blik waarop een verkeerd etiket is geplakt zodat niemand de inhoud kan raden.