Quotes About Introspection

It's rare that I hear the author blame the real culprit: themselves. It's hard to admit but it's the first step toward selling more books and understanding who bears the true responsibility for selling books—the author.

In a society that has become so oriented toward language as a way of representing truth, it is very possible to lose touch with your ability to feel and with it your ability to "remember" the shots themselves.

III Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is

My fiftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.

Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Go on, live in your poultry-yard. Scratch straw and cluck and cackle at everything that you take for a fox. [Exit.

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep — W.B. Yeats, from "When You are Old," The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats . (Scribner; 2nd Revised edition September 9, 1996) Originally published 1889.

triple solitude of age, eccentricity, and deafness

Young Man. Aoife is far away. I am alone. I have come alone in the midst of you To weigh this sword against Cuchullain's sword.

I sometimes think since I've retired, sitting in the shade here and feeling the winds shift, I must have been filled with a child dread you could catch somebody's dying if you got too close. And you can't be too sure.

To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

Whoever suffers from the malady of being unable to endure any injustice, must never look out of the window, but stay in his room with the door shut. He would also do well, perhaps, to throw away his mirror.

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

All we are not stares back at what we are.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.