Quotes About Introspection

Although there was much I wanted to say, I knew that I should not. His mind and heart were out of alignment, and only he could bring them into harmony.

Maybe it's that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don't see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren't there.

think much about girls. Considering my long, pale face and hound-dog eyes behind black-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, maybe I already knew that even through adulthood

Taciturnity sometimes could be a sign of a healthy ego that did not require constant gratification

The chief characteristics of my childhood were an aching loneliness and the daily struggle to avoid a bleakness of spirit that unrelieved loneliness can foment.

she and I seem to be more alike than not, acutely aware of the strangeness of the world and charmed by it's mysteries.

I read to keep from being sad.

His love life was about as romantic as an arm-wrestling contest. He was self-aware enough to know that he—not the women—was the problem, but he didn't know how to fix himself.

The best part of a Mr. Goodbar is not the wrapper, is it? No, and the best part of a Coke is not the can. On those nights when you lie awake, either man or boy, wondering about yourself, peeling away one layer of oddness after another, you should remember and always be grateful that the woefully imperfect person that you are, with all your contradictions and unworthy desires, is not the best of you, any more than the wrapper is the best part of a Mr. Goodbar.

I do not wish to shine. I prefer shadows, quiet, periods of solitude. I do not wish to be noticed. If one is all but invisible to others, one cannot be envied, inspire anger or suspicion. Near invisibility is a way of life that I recommend.

I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.

Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility.

The only thing I know for sure is how much I do not know. Maybe there is wisdom in that recognition. Unfortunately, I have found no comfort in it.

Being alone can be good. It is easy to find peace alone. But sometimes...being alone is a kind of death.

In the company of other people, Amy had little tolerance for quiet. Enduring mutual silences, she sometimes felt as though the other person might ask a terrible question, the answer to which, if she spoke it, would shatter her as surely as a hard-thrown stone will destroy a pane of glass.

Now comes the evening of the mind. Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood. —Donald Justice, "The Evening of the Mind

During the one minute of wakefulness after his head meets the pillow, he wonders not who he once was, not why that life is behind him and beyond recapture, not what organization finances him and crafts his missions. He wonders only how he was made into what he has become. Strange science must be involved, which intrigues him. Sleep.

Darkness was conducive to contemplation.

May the judgment not be too heavy upon us.

By all those tells, he wrote his anxiety and his guilt as clearly as if he had composed his confession on a blackboard with a stick of chalk.

Or his conscience had been eaten away by the cancer of narcissism.

We grow, we change, we labor to maturity, to what little wisdom we might ever acquire, but always in the mirror is who we were as well as who we are, a harking back and, yet again, a quiet reckoning.

Under her restlessness and licentious pose is a repressed wholesomeness that will always make her regret devaluing herself, which, even in these strange times, he believes is true of more people than not.

the morally bipolar are too preoccupied with justifying their contradictory behaviors to learn to laugh at themselves, and I've noticed they laugh at other people more than with them.