Quotes About Introspection

Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

The term itself—my life—is a desperate overstatement.

That's what it all comes down to in the end,' he said. 'A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

Explain me to myself, you'll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I'll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.

The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.

I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.

What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?

The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?

As though in her heart she was not a travel writer at all, as her mother had said she wished to be, but simply a traveler, in the purer form, someone who collects impressions, dense anatomies of feeling, but does not care to record them.

Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic.

No body knows how to feel and they're checking around for hints.

We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely.

He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain.

Writing is freedom.

Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it.

You understand it's not a matter of strategy. I'm not talking about secrets or deceptions. I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

Mainly we looked at people in other cars, trying to work out from their faces how frightened we should be.

It's the things we forget about that tell us who we are.

One must become a book before one can know what is inside it.

But you have to direct yourself out of this thing, not into it. Don't fold up.

It was the kind of day in which you forget words and drop things and wonder what it is you came into the room to get because you are standing here for a reason and you have to tell yourself it is just a question of sooner or later before you remember because you always remember once you are here. The thing is communicated somehow.