Quotes About Introspection

She said the music made her wonder, Does it alter us more to be heard, or to hear?

Solitude can reshape your life. Like a river that gets cut off from the sea. You think it's moving somewhere, but it's not. You can drown inside yourself.

It's only now, in hindsight, that I think she saw her own disappearance as a quality to be desired. That perhaps she needed, finally, to live unobserved.

She wanted to tell him that whatever happened, whatever they chose, one day they would have to come awake, everyone would have to stand up and confront themselves and realize that it wasn't the Party that made them do it. One day, they would be alone with their actions.

It was very modern and deeply western to listen to music that no one else could hear. Private music led to private thoughts. Private thoughts led to private desires, to private fulfillments or private hungers, to a whole private universe away from parents, family and society.

did I yearn for a new eye as a window to the outside world, or for the world to look in on me?

She wanted to tell them that whatever happened, whatever they chose, one day they would have to come awake, everyone would have to stand up and confront themselves and realize it wasn't the party that made them do it. One day, they would be alone with their actions.

Sometimes, I think, you can look at a person and know they are full of words. Maybe the words are withheld due to pain or privacy, or maybe subterfuge.

What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?

Utter ruin provokes soul-searching in even the least reflective of men.

Diane St. John had once said he looked as if he would speak in poetry, should he ever deign to speak at all.

the development of a sense of self.

Flexibility is a frame of mind. It is what allows us to choose the best response from a raft of different possibilities. Flexibility in parenting does not mean you should become a pushover. There is a delicate tightrope to be walked between your child's need for structure and the importance of considering content and context when you make decisions. But without flexibility, you are unlikely to be a successful parent and will certainly not be an empathic or introspective one.

If thirty years of being a psychologist has taught me anything, it is that it is much easier to talk about things than to change them.

Being human means being vulnerable but it also means having the capacity to modify our responses and to make different choices.

But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.

Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

I asked her how she did it once, how she understood the world so clearly. She told me that it was a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves.

But there was no wound she could give me that I had not already given myself.

But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.

Little by little I began to listen better: to the sap moving in the plants, to the blood in my veins. I learned to understand my own intention, to prune and to add, to feel where the power gathered and speak the right words to draw it to its height. That was the moment I lived for, when it all came clear at last and the spell could sing with its pure note, for me and me alone.

That old sickening feeling returned: that every moment of my life I had been a fool.

The scars themselves I offered to wipe away. He shook his head. "How would I know myself?