Quotes About Introspection

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.

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 the other.

I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word intellectual I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts.

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?

Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; 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. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

We all have our own trips and it is a nice drive.

I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

Maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

We went to get away from ourselves, and the way to do that is to drive, down through Nogales some day when the pretty green places pall and all that will move the imagination is some place difficult, some desert.

I smooth out the snapshot and look into his face, and do and do not see my own.

In just such self-doubts do small towns lose their character.

it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built "The Breakers" he damned himself.

I'm only myself in front of my typewriter.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4AM of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed.

I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty or twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable "I.

I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.

when she drank she did not dream.

we live blindly. We repeat the same mistakes by rote until an emotional punch to the gut brings us up short. ...Sometimes it requires intense pain before we can take a good hard look at ourselves, before we ask the important questions. ... Who am I? What is important? What do I believe? What do I want?

They say an unexamined life is not worth living

What would you say you've taken away from all this? ... That running away solves nothing? That my desperate need for a man to fill my life, to make me feel whole, blinded me to what's important? ...

It's easy to blame someone else for our failings...

No sabem res de nosaltres mateixos; estem plens per dins de coses que ni sospitem. És per a nosaltres mateixos que som més incomprensibles.

No sabem res dels altres, ni ens importa; en canvi, voldriem que els altres ens coneguessin a fons. El nostre afany de ser compresos només es pot comparar amb la nostra desgana per comprendre ningú.