Quotes About Introspection

We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it, As though we had written it.

Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around"? From Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road

Fuck me for always getting into situations like this. Fuck me for caring. Fuck me for not knowing the words that would've made her stay. Fuck me for not knowing what I want. Fuck me for wavering. Fuck me for not kissing her back the right way. Fuck me for getting my hopes up. Fuck me for not having more realistic hopes. Fuck me for giving her my fucking jacket. Fuck.

But we had never gone out of our way to reveal ourselves, either. Instead, we'd let the facts speak for themselves.

I'd never thought a single sentence could turn me off so decisively from both making love and playing the piano, but there it was.

Because I'm so tired of worshipping breakable things. Because I wanted to see the impulse through. Because I wanted to see the look on their faces. Because I wanted to do something that I've kept inside of me so they could see what's been inside me all this time.

I feel like I know her. Really know her. And part of really knowing her is also knowing that I don't necessarily know her as well as I think I do. Which is okay. We should each have our own damn souls.

Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around

I'm saying you have me nestled so comfortingly in your idea of who I am, you have no idea who I actually am.

I reveled in solitude. If Lily wanted to believe there was a somebody out there just for her, I wanted to believe that I could be somebody in here just for me.

I was ever ill-suited for this world and could not bend my nature to it.

Some candle inside him was dangerously close to guttering. A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn't what you thought it was.

She said to him then, crisply, "Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.

So Mary spoke always, posing each declaration as a question, soliloquy in guise of conversation.

What sort of life is possible—with no ground beneath one's feet except the logic of one's own mind?

For is not life solitary, and every thinker lonely?

Some candle inside him was dangerously close to guttering. A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn't what you thought it was.

He took it between his fingers, bore down with his bruised knuckle on its ridges, and like a miner picking his way toward an unknown destination began to write—slowly, steadily, filling the void with work. Was that what sadness did to a man?

Yet to die alone would be honest. For is not life solitary, and every thinker lonely?

What sort of life is possible--with no ground beneath one's feet except the logic of one's own mind?

Philosophy could be severed from life.

She had seen early in life that there was none in this world to audit one's soul. A man could deform himself into the most miserable of creatures, and no holy hand would descend from the clouds and cry Halt. And if there was no auditor, then one must audit one's own soul, tenaciously and without mercy.

At times she could barely speak in response to the rabbi's questions. Other times she could hardly find enough breath for all the words she needed to utter, though the rabbi listened with great patience. On those days the new thoughts so brimmed in her that she felt the white plaster ceiling and the timbers and the brickwork walls couldn't contain her—should she raise her head to speak once more, she'd shake the house down.

From a good teacher you may learn the secret of listening. You will never learn the secret of life. You will have to listen for yourself