Quotes About Introspection

Like all men you have a religion - at least a way of looking at yourself and the universe both at once, which is all I'd hope a religion to be...

I'd thought something was required of me, but I hadn't wanted to find out what it was.

It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he'd reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he'd never be able to guess what it was.

She was resting at a table between numbers in the Greek nightclub where she was dancing. A little of the stage light touched her. She was very frail. She seemed to be thinking about something far away, waiting patiently for somebody to destroy her.

Now we had a stupid silence, the kind that always descends on people who are half in the bag.

Well, it's very much for each person to experience alone," he said, and whatever truth he meant to get at, his eyes were the visible scars of it.

Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?' Oh, I don't know. I'm a fat piece of shit, I guess.

I don't remember what I said to them. I remember loneliness crushing first my lungs. Then my heart. Then my balls.

I know there are people who believe that wherever you look, all you see is yourself. Episodes like this make me wonder it they aren't right. Dirty Wedding

My habit when I've been humiliated is to go out and buy a book.

Staring at his own face reflected in a cup of bitter karma. For

read until his focus loosened and the lines of text divided into duplicates and floated on the page.

We hadn't yet mentioned our names. We probably wouldn't. In barrooms I lived this over and over.

Make no mistake. You are your most important critic and your conscience your most important judge of character.

Make this moment the moment of truth about yourself. You have been selling short all of your life.

Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.

But I often think we talk way too much in this society, that we consider verbalization a panacea that it very often is not, and that we turn a blind eye to the sort of morbid self-absorption that becomes a predictable by-product of it.

It had occurred to Sean once - on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical - that maybe they HAD gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they'd become if they ever escaped and grew up.

After all your years climbing around in people's heads like a cranial janitor, do you think people know why they do things? People rationalize, they turn their delusions into something romantic that they can disguise as ethics or principles or ideals. People are selfish, Doctor- odiously, monstrously, but in so small and paltry a monstrousness that we barely notice it.

Men who believe that the way to the mind is not by way of ice picks through the brain or large dosages of dangerous medicine but through an honest reckoning of the self.

SUN WAS in the room when he woke. He sat up and looked toward the bars, but the bars weren't there. Just a window, lower than it should have been until he realized he was up

The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.

Everyone wants to tell you something -anything, everything - about themselves and they just go on and on and on. But when it comes time to show you who they are? Their shit is weak, Nadia. Their shit is lacking. And they just cover it up by talking more, by explaining away what can't be explained away. And then they go on talking more shit about someone else.

You've always had a soft heart, son. You just hide it better than most. Danny shrugged. Starting to hide it from myself, then, I guess. Always the danger, that. Then one day, sure, you can't remember where you left all those pieces you tried so hard to hold on. Or why you work so hard at the holding.