Quotes About Introspection

As he started down towards his office, Brunetti thought about how taking a look at one's unconscious motives and prejudices was like walking barefoot through cloudy water: you never knew whether you were going to step on something disgusting or bang your toe into a rock.

Her glance put him on the scales and weighed him, and then she said, 'Less trouble accepting reality, I think.

Not for the first time, he cringed when he saw his own prejudices manifest in other people.

All those layers of silence upon silence.

We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.

Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very much different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment for what it actually was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.

Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones I did not.

For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I'd lost with my mother. Everything about her was a snowstorm of fascination

And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it.

small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch for the open door.

For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless.

You don't feel a great deal of emotions for other people, do you? I was taken aback. What are you talking about? I said. Of course I do. Do you? He raised an eyebrow. I don't think so. It doesn't matter, he said, after a long, tense pause. I don't, either.

my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And

In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person's soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.

With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested—ominously—a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.

Is it easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness.

Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.

But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.

But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.

I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greak. ?????? ?? ????. Beauty is harsh. ? Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves our of despair.

I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality—talk, footsteps, slamming doors—which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.

Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships.