Quotes About Introspection

order to truly forgive oneself, one must either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge that one's behavior was wrong and accept responsibility or blame for such behavior.

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

It's a big formless, arctic night, the stars so bright they seem to hiss. I walk with my hands in pockets, arms pressed to my sides. Even in my down parka, the cold is still there. I feel as though my blood is crackling in it, my bones conducting cold like wires. My toes are curled in their boots.

Why d'ye talk to yourself?' 'It assures me of a good listener.

It isn't necessarily easier if you know what it is you're meant to do-- but at least you don't waste time in questioning or doubting. If you're honest--well, that isn't necessarily easier, either. Though I suppose if you're honest with yourself and know what you are, at least you're less likely to feel that you've wasted your life, doing the wrong thing.

You invent yourself...You look at other women-or men; you try on their lives for size. You take what you can use, and you look inside yourself for what you can't find elsewhere. And always...always...you wonder if you're doing it right.

Perhaps it was only that the sense of reaching out to something larger than yourself gives you some feeling that there is something larger - and there really has to be, because plainly you aren't sufficient to the situation.

Claire knew the flavor of solitude. It was cold as spring water, and not all could drink it; for some it was not refreshment, but mortal chill.

He had learned early on the trick of living separately in a crowd, private in his mind when his body could not be. But he was born a mountain-dweller, and had learned early, too, the enchantment of solitude, and the healing of quiet places.

think it's as though everyone has a small place inside themselves, maybe, a private bit that they keep to themselves. It's like a little fortress, where the most private part of you lives—maybe it's your soul, maybe just that bit that makes you yourself and not anyone else.

My God, he thought, I'm going to die before I've been born.

You know these things. — And yet, somehow, you never think it will be today.

It's what happens when you live through things you shouldn't have been able to live through and can't reconcile that knowledge with the fact that you did.

Why d'ye talk to yourself?" "It assures me of a good listener

I hadn't spent so much time in bemused contemplation of a penis since I was sixteen or so, and here I was, preoccupied with three of the things.

It isn't necessarily easier if you know what it is you're meant to do—but at least you don't waste time in questioning or doubting. If you're honest—well, that isn't necessarily easier, either. Though I suppose if you're honest with yourself and know what you are, at least you're less likely to feel that you've wasted your life, doing the wrong thing.

solitude was in its own way a balm for loneliness.

Would it be better if I'd had daughters?" she asked the mirror, in apparent earnestness. "No," she answered herself. "They'd only marry men, and there you are.

The words were before him, and yet I thought he wasn't reading them from the paper, but from the pages of his memory, from the open book of his heart.

was slipping, and his face had gone as white as my own. He looked down again, avoiding my stricken gaze. "I suppose all I was wondering," he murmured, "was…was he…was he different from me?" I saw him bite his lip as though wishing the words unsaid, but it was far too late

I've seen women-and men too, sometimes-as canna bear the sound of their own thoughts, and they maybe dinna make such good matches with those who can.

A strange thought occurs to me. There is of course no point of similarity between yourself and Stapleton in terms of circumstance or character. And yet there is one peculiar commonality. Both you and Stapleton know. And for your separate reasons, cannot or will not speak of it to anyone. The odd result of this is that I feel quite free in the company of either one of you, in a way that I cannot be free with any other man.

I felt simultaneously wonderful and wretched, and didn't know from moment to moment which feeling was uppermost.

Grey was modest about his own endowments, but also honest enough to admit that he possessed some and that his person was reasonably attractive to women.