Quotes About Introspection

distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were.

Books are written by the alone for the alone.

Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not.

By his own choice, he had so little contact with the outside world that he frequently considered the commonplace to be bizarre: an automatic-teller machine, for instance, or some new peculiarity in the supermarket—cereal shaped like vampires, or unrefrigerated yogurt sold in pop-top cans.

But those sparkling blue shallows- so enticing at first glance- had not yet graded off into depths, so that sometimes I got the disconcerting sensation of wading around in knee-high waters hoping to step into a drop-off, a place deep enough to swim.

Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open.

But the intimacy, the smallness, also made me feel shut out; and I found myself hurrying past the inviting little doorways with my head down, very aware of all the convivial Sunday-morning lives unrolling around me in private.

Now searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.

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. "And how can we lose this maddening

And if what they say is true--if every great painting is really a self-portrait--what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?

BEFORE BORIS, I HAD borne my solitude stoically enough, without realizing quite how alone I was.

Maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.

it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again

Years ago, in an old notebook, I wrote: One of Julian's most attractive qualities is his inability to see anyone, or anything, in its true light. And under it, in a different ink, maybe one of my most attractive qualities, as well(?) -Richard

I often thought how peculiar my life must look to someone reading those letters, far away.

All right," said Julian, looking around the table. "I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

You'd be surprised, Theo. she said, leaning back in her shawl-shaped chair, what 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.

A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.

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 different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment then for what it was; I suppose we never do.

It didn't occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I'd missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.

I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time:

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. — FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

And this is either a completely disastrous question or the most sensible one I've ever asked in all my life.

only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand.