Quotes About Introspection

We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it.

I couldn't help suspecting I had manufactured the whole thing, my need for him, simply to avoid what I considered to be the alternatives. This is one of my very annoying traits. I can't sit back and let something grow of its own momentum and eventually reveal its truth or horror. I must probe it from the outset.

Is a cardigan what women wear when they don't want to talk about themselves?

Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.

Is his manhood a sham? Does he love himself or hate himself? I don't think he knows. Or it changes minute to minute. Or the question is so implicit in everything he does that he can't get outside it to answer

She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she'd held for much of her life.

This is what long journeys are for. To see what's back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father's situation, that you'll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations.

That's great. Tell me about it. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography. The beginning of the end.

In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe.

Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?

His stillness was commanding. I felt myself getting whiter by the second. What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in? I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched in my chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word and thing a beadwork of bright creation.

We have our self-importance. We also have our inadequacy. The former is a desperate invention of the latter.

She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.

What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

Isolation is not a drawback to those who understand that isolation is the point.

When I get real high I can feel the space between sounds.

What was there to say? It was a matter of silences, not words.

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?

The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.

I had to wonder whether this interval had any more spread and breadth than just another sequestered moment, bordered by closed doors.

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.

I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint Augustine. And herein lies my sickness.

Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred.