Quotes About Introspection

The downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life.

I don't have to watch the evening news to see that the world is bad, I only have to look at myself.

Just out of high school, you didn't realize you were creating drama for the sake of drama.

When the credits roll, we wonder what we did with our lives, and what was the meaning.

A big part of me needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. The thing that had been designed to tell me who I was was gone.

external, internal, and philosophical problems.

The boy's mother said he was autistic and sometimes spaced out, staring at his hands, but because I didn't know what autism was, really, I figured he was more or less mesmerized by his existence. I was romanticizing the situation because the kid was probably distracting himself or daydreaming or something, but I thought maybe he was like Hamlet looking at his hands, thinking sincerely about what it means to have been born.

The movies I like best are the slow literary movies that don't seem to be about anything and yet are about everything at the same time.

But I didn't like thinking about myself anymore. You get tired of thinking about yourself all the time when you're a writer.

Everything's a mirror when you're a writer; the computer monitor is a mirror. Who thinks they are so important they need to write books about themselves? Who are these people who write about themselves, and how did I become one of them?

I went there to try to get my head around this idea, this idea that the problem in the universe lives within me. I can't think of anything more progressive than the embrace of this fundamental idea.

The stories we tell ourselves are very different from the stories we tell the world.

If you're going to have an existential crisis, Portland in winter is hard to beat.

For a long time, I thought I was good at relationships because I was charming.

To do this, you want to start by listing the top five reasons why someone would not want to do business with you.

want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

The thing about trying to remember your life is it makes you wonder what any of it means. You get the feeling life means something, but you're not sure what. Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it.

I turned out the light and lay in my bed and thought about the girls I had dated, the fear I have of getting married, and the incredible selfishness from which I navigate my existence.

I didn't want to live in a broken world or a broken me. I wasn't trying to weasel out of anything, I just wasn't in the mood to be on earth that night.

Do you understand the game you're playing? Or are you, just like us, prostituting your feelings, conscience, duty? But then we shall never forgive you for that, never ever. . . .30

When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same. The temperament is not that different.

Cinderella Rule #16 Standards. Goals. Everyone has them. Or should. But before you judge yourself a success or failure, make certain the standards you're applying are your own. And that the goals you're trying to achieve aren't being pursued for the wrong reasons.

La nube del no saber —respondió el conte, e hizo una pausa—. Siempre me ha parecido un título maravilloso para una autobiografía.

I've been thinking that of late - she said. - Thinking what? - That the world of Henry James is becoming very small for me.