Quotes About Introspection

One reads alone, even in another's presence.

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.

Si conobbero. Lui conobbe lei e se stesso, perché in verità non s'era mai saputo. E lei conobbe lui e se stessa, perché pur essendosi saputa sempre, mai s'era potuta riconoscere così.

How well I would write if I were not here!

La lettura è solitudine. Si legge da soli anche quando si è in due.

Reading is solitude.

You explode, if that's more to your taste, shoot yourself all around in endless darts, be prodigal, spendthrift, reckless: I shall implode, collapse inside the abyss of myself, towards my buried centre, infinitely.

Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find.

And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.

again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.

Tu casa, al ser el lugar donde lees, puede decirnos cuál es el lugar que los libros tienen en tu vida, si son una defensa que tú interpones para mantener alejado al mundo de fuera, un sueño en el que te hundes como en una droga, o bien si son puentes que lanzas hacia el exterior, hacia el mundo que te interesa tanto que quieres multiplicar y dilatar sus dimensiones a través de los libros.

A volte uno si crede incompleto ed è soltanto giovane.

With my spyglass I can observe a woman who is reading on a terrace in the valley," I told her. "I wonder if the books she reads are calming or upsetting." "How does the woman seem to you? Calm or upset?" "Calm." "Then she reads upsetting books.

So our efforts led us to become those perfect objects of a sense whose nature nobody quite knew yet, and which later became perfect precisely through the perfection of its object, which was, in fact, us. I'm talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: the eyes that finally opened to see us didn't belong to us but to others.

Contemplating the stars he has become accustomed to considering himself an anonymous and incorporeal dot, almost forgetting that he exists; to deal now with human beings, he cannot help involving himself, and he no longer knows where his self is to be found.

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

To explode or to implode – said Qfwfq – that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration.

This is what I wanted to hear from you: confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!

??c là ni?m cô ??n.