Quotes About Introspection

If you saw through everything, it made it hard to figure out what to do with yourself.

Obviously, I had talked too much, recounted too long a list. By that gauge, the years since puberty were peaks and valleys and stretches of incoherent landscape.

I liked my floaty, superior life more than I could have admitted. I liked the remote spaces I was settling into. I liked looking down from above — the calm of it. I kept this preference to myself. Mostly.

There was more to be said for the power of regret than was often said.

That was the way to start, he knew: with unsureness. Only when the mind cracked open its own worldly certainties could a glimpse of light appear.

I hate it when the voice inside my head chews me out.

Sagittarians rarely talk about their feelings—they talk about what they think about their feelings.

Watch: (1) You do something nasty to me. (2) I hate you. (3) You find it uncomfortable to be hated. (4) You think how nice it would be if I didn't hate you. (5) You decide I ought not to hate you because hate is bad. (6) Good people don't hate. (7) Because I hate you I am a bad person. (8) It is not what you did to me that makes me hate you, it is my own bad nature. I—not you—am the cause of my hating you.

Scholars don't usually sit gasping and sobbing in corners of the library stacks. But they should. They should.

You're stuck with yourself, so you might as well try and be someone you can stand to live with.

Or was she going to be sensible, reliable, patient Elinor who never put her own feelings first because -- let's face it -- she didn't have any worth considering in the first place, did she?

We all overlay our feelings with too much thinking. We are afraid of our feelings because they are arbitrary and volatile, and we often need literature to make our feelings intelligible to us, to make us see that our reaction to what we can't choose and what we can is what shapes our lives.

If I could only meet Sally in the silent reading room of the public library, it wouldn't make any difference.

Yes, and the

To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think...This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact.

Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know.

But if you could travel back through Time, and find yourself as you used to be, wouldn't you try, just once at least, to give her some kind of warning? Wouldn't you want to make things right?

Sometimes walking away is best. I should know. It's my specialty.

She always had that look about her, that look of otherness, of eyes that see things much too far, and of thoughts that wander off the edge of the world.

Why do boys always run? And when did I stop running?

Nada tenho que ver com a ciência; mas, se tantos homens em quem supomos juízo são reclusos por dementes, quem nos afirma que o alienado não é o alienista?

Mas, ou muito me engano, ou acabo de escrever um capítulo inútil.

Se só me faltassem os outros, vá, um homem consola-se mais ou menos das pessoas que perde; mas falto eu mesmo, e esta lacuna é tudo.

Escapei ao agregado, escapei a minha mãe não indo ao quarto dela, mas não escapei a mim mesmo. Corri ao meu quarto, e entrei atrás de mim. Eu falava-me, eu perseguia-me, eu atirava-me à cama, e rolava comigo, e chorava, e abafava os soluços com a ponta do lençol.