Quotes About Introspection

Am I really a person who lives by faith? God can surely tell the difference between someone who walks in darkness and someone who walks with her eyes shut. Which am I?

Sometimes I wish I could put my whole life on pause...just make everything stop for a while so I can figure shit out.

Psychoanalysts learn a great deal about patients by listening to their humor. And you can learn a great deal about your own psychological makeup by constantly asking yourself (and answering truthfully), Why did I laugh at this joke and not at others?

The artistic disposition is little more than an extreme form of sulking.

Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.

Maybe I lacked coping skills. Maybe I was weak. I cared for people for no better reason than they seemed to care for me, acknowledge me. It didn't seem so dangerous at the time.

Literature is literature. Its purpose is to challenge and disorient us, to break us down a little bit so that we are forced to rebuild ourselves. Over time, over the course of many books, we construct a deeper, truer self.

Now and then I'd catch my mother looking at my like she was thinking about her life, like she was about to say something, but she never did. I didn't expect it. Sometimes it's better not to go back--just settle accounts as they are, call it even.

And yet, far off, I can hear something whispering that this compulsion to do, to intrude ourselves, to improve on what is--even when wholly well intentioned, particularly when wholly well intentioned--is the source of all our troubles.

I distrust the perpetually busy, always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.

Who knows what somber ancestor had passed on to me this talent, this precocious ear for loss? For a while, because of it, I misheard almost everything.

Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

There are times in every life when the past acquires a particular resonance, when we grow sensitive to sounds and voices normally beyond the range of hearing. The past shades into present always and everywhere, but only rarely do we acknowledge the process; only rarely does some trigger force us to recognize ourselves as citizens of that frontier.

I can navigate the canals of self-delusion, say, like nobody's business. The less certain something is, the more I understand it; the less tangible it is, the more readily my fingers grasp it. Just give me a little shove down the byways of regret, and I'm in my element. Which

I stopped being a little Christ and instead began filling out the application that I had labeled Christian. It was not a definition based on the actual namesake, but rather on those who frequent the clubhouse. And in the midst of being an American Christian among all the other American Christians, I stopped truly searching the nuances of who Christ was and is in order to fully grasp what a little Christ might, indeed, act like.

I have been the Pharisee tsk-tsking those who don't do things my/God's way. Not serving Jesus, but rather standing on His back to reach the high cookie jar so that I can serve myself.

Yes, we are all alone in this world. At least, when it comes right down to it. We are by ourselves, even when we're with others. All our thoughts are ours, alone.

Now you invent the boat of your flesh and set it upon the watersand drift in the gradual swell, in the laboring salt.Now you look down. The waters of childhood are there.

You want to get a good look at yourself. You stand before a mirror, you take off your jacket, unbutton your shirt, open your belt, unzip your fly. The outer clothing falls from you. You take off your shoes and socks, baring your feet. You remove your underwear. At a loss, you examine the mirror. There you are. You are not there.

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

I grow into my death. My life is small and getting smaller. The world is green. Nothing is all.

this is the mirror in which pain is asleep this is the country nobody visits

I walk into what light there is — Mark Strand, from "Another Place," Collected Poems (Knopf Doubleday, 2014)

C. S. Lewis wrote of temptation, "No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.