Quotes About Introspection

Do not listen to your enemy, Odysseus had once told me. Look at them. It will tell you everything.

I never claimed to be good.

I had known contentment before, brief snatches of time in which I pursued solitary pleasure: skipping stones or dicing or dreaming. But in truth, it had been less a presence than an absence, a laying aside of dread:

I had a wild thought there, beneath that sky. I will eat these herbs. Then whatever is truly in me, let it be out, at last. I brought them to my mouth. But my courage failed. What was I truly? In the end, I could not bear to know.

Everything was united by the steady rise and fall of nature's breath. Everything except for me.

Two children he had had, and he had not seen either clearly. But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

I sifted and resifted my memories of Aeëtes, all those hours we had leaned against each other. That old sickening feeling returned: that every moment of my life I had been a fool.

Know yourself is carved above their doors. But I had been a stranger to myself, turned to stone for no reason I could name.

A true-made bow, Odysseus had called her. A fixed star. A woman who knew herself. "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.

For a hundred generations, I had walked the world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay.

I touched the thought like a bruise, testing its ache.

It was a trick of his, to set a sentence out like a plate on a table and see what you would put on it.

but there was no wound she could give me that i had nit already given myself

He was watching me closely, reading my face over and over, like a priest searching the auguries for an answer. I could see the slight line in his forehead that meant utmost concentration. Something shifted in me then, like the frozen surface of the Apidanos in spring. I had seen the way he looked at Deidameia; or rather the way he did not. It was the same way he had looked at the boys in Phthia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.

I forget about the god, why I have fallen, why my feet stick in the same crevices I have already climbed. Perhaps this is all I do, I think, demented -- climb walls and fall from them. And this time when I look up, the god is not smiling.

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

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

I had made so many mistakes that I could not find my way back through their tangle to the first one.

Would I be skimmed milk or a harpy? A foolish gull or a villainous monster?

because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world

Lorsque nous sommes jeunes, nous croyons être les premiers au monde à ressentir chaque sentiment.

The more one tries to analyze oneself the more one is conscious of amazing paradoxes and inconsistencies which lurk under the simplest surface.

Don't let me ever compete with anyone! If I'm a worm and no man, let me enjoy my life as a worm. Let me stop showing off to anyone... Let me live my life free from the opinions, good or bad, of all other people!