Quotes About Introspection

187. Is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? Losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. More precise. One could leave it, too, as it is. -- Yet how can I explain, that every time I put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as I turn away from it?

How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted," says Goethe's sorrowful young Werther. "How clearly I still see it, and yet show no sign of improvement.

We sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

Instantaneous, noncalibrated, digital self-revelation is one of my greatest nightmares.

I am getting the bad feeling that my friends are growing tired of me. I am growing tired of me, too.

We sometimes weep in front of the mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

Standing / apart from them one wonders / what on earth is a straight woman. / 'The only love I have ever felt / was for children and other women. / Everything else was just lust, pity, self-hatred, / pity, and lust.

or stays up all night watching colored shadows drift across the walls? At times I have done all of these things, but not in service of science, nor of philosophy, not even of poetry.

How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted

I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms— if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. 72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

In one of my favorites of your drawings, two Popsicles are talking to each other. One accuses, "You're more interested in fantasy than reality." The other responds, "I'm interested in the reality of my fantasy." Both of the Popsicles are melting off their sticks.

I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke -- take your pick -- an apprehension of the divine. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)

But what goes on in you when you talk about colour as if it were a cure, when you have not yet stated your disease.

Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet.

one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

She is like no one you have ever met. She cares not what people may think of her. She follows entirely her own course." He sits forward, placing his elbows on his knees, dropping his voice to a whisper. "She can look at a person and see right into their very soul. There is not a drop of harshness in her. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be." He glances at Eliza. "Those are rare qualities, are they not?

To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.

Morirse será así, notar que algo se acerca y que no se puede evitar? Este pensamiento surge de la nada y le cae en la cabeza como una gota de vino en el agua, la mancha, oscura y expansiva, le colorea las ideas.

Do you think, Daniel," she said to him, rolling over onto her back so that she was able to look out of the window while she spoke, "that we might have reached the end of our story?

He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place. He will sit in a room in body, but in his head he is somewhere else, someone else, in a place known only to him.

I have a theory,' she says, looking far ahead, at where salt meets sky, 'that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn't. All you have to do now is work out what it is.

He feels as though he is caught in a web of absence, its strings and tendrils ready to stick and cling to him, whichever way he turns.

There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence.