Quotes About Introspection

I was numb, but it was from not knowing just what this new life would hold for me.

I look at this place (Antigua), I look at these people (Antiguans), and I cannot tell whether I was brought up by, and so come from, children, eternal innocents, or artists who have not yet found eminence in a world too stupid to understand, or lunatics who have made their own lunatic asylum, or an exquisite combination of all three.

But I seemed unable to do anything that pleased anyone and that included me, my own self, though at that time I did not know that myself constituted such a thing as existence

I like to be in my pajamas all day. Sometimes I don't wash for days because I like to read and sit around. I like to eat in bed. I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned. I'm not fun to be with.

I said, "All along I have been wondering how you got to be the way you are. Just how it was that you got to be the way you are.

That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him.

I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.

Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

And my difficulties were these: I found each plant, each new turn in the road, each new turn in the weather, from cold to hot and then back again, each new set of boulders so absorbing, so new, and the newness so absorbing, and I was so in need of an explanation for each thing, that I was often in tears, troubling myself with questions, such as what am I and what is the thing in front of me.

The greatest teacher in the world is you, yourself."

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

It has occurred to me that the thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the best, and that is your leisure - the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below.

If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

For this is the journey that men make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much what else they find.

of them gave those thoughts a second consideration

Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it?

No clamor, only the thick quietude of crumpled talk.

Yes. Andrew. Ralph, I have to tell you about Jay." Hannah and Mary looked at each other. With everything that Andrew said, from then on, they realized in a sense which they had failed to before, that it had really happened and that it was final.

She'd feel better later on if she'd kept a few of these things to herself, Joel thought. Or would she. I would. But I'm not Poll.

How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home, it's good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. And what's it all for? All I tried to be, all I ever wanted and went away for, what's it all for?

A man is literally what he thinks

Only himself manacles man.