Quotes About Introspection

Prayer's a very tricky business.

People do look different with their eyes closed, their features seem so much more sculptured.

but it is always dreadful when the pictures in front of one's eyes become meaningless and the real word is there instead and seems meaningless, too.

There's nothing more, except that I usually sit down until the flames die down and try to think myself back into the past.

Incidentally, I never felt less brisk in my life, because being looked at like that makes a person feel dizzy.

I glanced through another page in case I had missed something, and came to the description of Simon's face as he lay on the grass with his eyes closed. It gave me a stab in which happiness and misery were somehow a part of each other.

As she only cries about once a year I really ought to have gone over and comforted her, but I wanted to set it all down here. I begin to see that writers are liable to become callous.

I could see he was nervous; at least, I thought I could, but then it struck me how little I know of him, or of Topaz or Rose or anyone in the world, really, except myself.

she is a girl who cannot walk her troubles off, or work them off; she is a girl to sit around and glare.

I leaned against the carved banisters and listened to the music and felt quite different from any way I have ever felt before -- softer, very beautiful and as if a great many men were in love with me and I might very easily be in love with them.

Feeling like what, Cassandra Mortmain? Flat? Depressed? Empty? If so, why, pray? I thought if I made myself write I should find out what is wrong with me, but I haven't, so far. Unless — could I possibly be jealous of Rose? I will pause and search my innermost soul . . . I have searched it for a solid five minutes. And I swear I am not jealous of Rose; [..]

I really am just as discontented, but I don't seem to notice it so much.

It's hopeless to make friends with people who never talk about themselves.

Ik schrijf dit terwijl ik in de gootsteen zit

But there is something I want to capture. It has to do with the feeling I had when I watched the Cottons coming down the lane, the queer separate feeling. I like seeing people when they can't see me. I have often looked at our family through lighted windows and they seem quite different, a bit the way rooms seen in looking-glasses do. I can't get the feeling into words — it slipped away when I tried to capture it.

There are some people who always find beauty makes them feel sadder, which is a very mysterious thing.

I thought what a good man he is, yet never annoyingly holy. And it struck me for the first time that if such a clever, highly educated man can believe in religion, it is almost impudent of an ignorant person like me to feel bored and superior about it.

To learn the way of the Buddha is to learn about oneself. To learn about oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to be enlightened by everything in the world. To be enlightened by everything in the world is to let fall one's own body and mind.

If you can't find the truth right where you are, where do you expect to find it?

There are people with their hands in their hair, holding in their brains.

If everybody spent enough time worrying about their own goddamn selves, no one would have to worry about anyone else.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.