Quotes About Introspection

but when I look at you now, I don't know who you are." I told her I occasionally had the same feeling about myself.

So that's what it means to be a nonpracticing homosexual, I thought: it means I don't know what I am!

The autobiography part isn't what matters," I began, before I got bogged down in all the amalgams. The

Graham Greene

What young writer is attracted to a sunny disposition?

I cannot describe the change nor do I know when it took place, yet I know that there is a change for I look on the carcass of a man now with pretty much such feeling as I would were it a horse or hog.

Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself.

Then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

one of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind's imagining into another

I was too much in solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only resource.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death.

Yet can I think of thee till thought is blind

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

To be thrown among people who care not for you, with whom you have no sympathies[-] [it] forces the Mind upon its own resources, and leaves it free to make its speculations [on] the differences of human character and to class them with the calmness of a Botanist...

Like two figures in the medieval Morality play, Pragmatism and Morality spar in the boxing ring of my brain.

Too long have I confined myself in Miltonic isolation and meditation. It is clearly time for me to step boldly into our society, not in the boring, passive manner of the Myrna Minkoff school of social action, but with great style and zest.

Ignatius, all at once you're your horrible old self. All at once I think I'm making a very big mistake.

After all, I do not believe that one must necessarily scrape bottom, as it were, in order to view his society subjectively. Rather than moving vertically downward, one may move horizontally outward toward a point of sufficient detachment where a modicum of creature comforts are not necessarily precluded.

I thought that the vibrissae about my nostrils detected something unique while I was outside.

John Kennedy Toole

Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.

Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I have not been able to identify its presence.