Quotes About Introspection

People want to be understood and to understand, but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don't know what our problem is. We keep stepping in the same puddle.

Will you see my vulnerabilities, my lies, my shame? Will you see the human in my being?

By focusing on one external calamity after another, Charlotte has been distracting herself from the real crises in her life—the internal ones. Sometimes "drama," no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.

She wasn't willing to look at what she was doing that made it difficult for people to give her what she wanted.

Not knowing is a good place to start," he says, and this feels like a revelation. I

It's not that she's hiding her feelings; it's that she can't access them. There's a word for this kind of emotional blindness: alexithymia. She doesn't know what she's feeling or doesn't have the words to express it.

Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

Our must-haves and deal-breakers are the "what," when they should be the "why.

The climb speaks to our character, but the view, I think, to our souls. The

Regrets serve their purpose. You'll see.

Jennings, barely listening to the little girls' chatter, sat amazed at the way life continued. He was not the same person.

When had she gotten so isolated? When had her world shrunk so small?

biggest troublemaker you'll ever meet stares you in the face when you brush your teeth. —Dutch Callahan

Say less than the other fellow and listen more than you talk; for when a man's listening he isn't telling on himself and he's flattering the fellow who is.

When a fellow's got what he set out for in this world, he should go off into the woods for a few weeks now and then to make sure that he's still a man, and not a plug-hat and a frock-coat and a wad of bills.

What would they say if they knew I sit for two months on six lines of poetry?

Know amazedly how often one takes his madness into his own hands and keeps it.

Books were her easiest friends. They demanded nothing from her but her attention.

Like all the girls back then I knew that being too clever was much worse than being too tall. Being five foot three, tongue-tied and blonde I mostly passed muster, except that I was so unskilled in small talk that I sometimes blurted big words (hypocrisy, or pretentiousness), which jumped out of my mouth like the toads of the fairy tale before I knew it. In any case, you could cultivate the wrong sort of silence - the sort that implied brooding self-absorption rather than attentiveness.

Do I often feel conflicted or ambivalent regarding my relationship with this person?

Eventually it comes to you: the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which makes you lonely.

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.

Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.