Quotes About Introspection

Any attempts at autobiography before the age of eighty seem pretty self-involved to me. There are a lot of smart middle aged people but not many wise ones.

You are your own best teacher. ~Jimmy Buffett

People always believe that they are able to be objective, especially when it comes to relationships, yet very few are truly capable of

People always believe that they are able to be objective, especially when it comes to relationships, yet very few are truly capable of it.

Did you ever sit back and evaluate your life and think, "Boy, things are going just as I always wanted them to?" I didn't think so.

Sou o culpado do que nem sei, de dor em aberto, no meu foro. Soubesse - se as coisas fossem outras.

The maxim had often helped him, at any rate, and even saved him from making some wrong decisions, because he had rarely made a mistake when he had followed his own judgment alone. He put a piece of paper in front of each of us and dictated: "Etiam si omnes—ego non! It's from the Gospel According to St. Matthew

Learn to breathe, learn to speak , but first ..learn to feel

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.

See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do... on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there...

I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.

from On Keeping a Notebook]: It is a good idea to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about…I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not…Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

Tell me what matters, BZ said. Nothing, Maria said.

You talk crazy any more and I'll leave. Leave. For Christ's sake leave. She would not take her eyes from the dry wash. All right. Don't, he would say then. Don't. Why do you say those things. Why do you fight. He would sit on the bed and put his head in his hands. To find out if you're alive.

I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I'm not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.

I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues.

It's not you. It's anyone. Sometimes I don't want anyone around. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and the light comes through the shutters on the floor and I think I never want to leave my own room.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion. If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years, I might never find out who the people are, and what they are doing.

During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn't think. All I knew then was what I couldn't do. All I knew then was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer.

My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.