Quotes About Introspection

If we read Dickinson's letters looking for action in the usual sense—where she traveled, what chores she did, whom she encountered—we find some details for reconstructing her days, but not many. But if we read the letters for what the poet thought, her interior world opens.

Whether she knew it then or not, she would bore into her own interior, confronting an unknown as wild and uncertain as any new world a missionary had seen. A place as rare as Noah's.

Emily could hardly get up in the morning without metaphors and images flooding her mind. Often her letters to Austin took on the appearance of a composition exercise, as if she were trying to freeze a moment in words and capture not only the look, but also the feel of an instant.

Even more than studying, listen to the sound of God around you, his mother had urged. It is "the most important of all calls."19 Emily had not received letters from her parents about professing her faith. As they had when she was home, Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson left the subject of Christian conversion to their daughter and did not pressure her.

Another problem with people who fail to examine themselves is that they often prove all too easily influenced.

I mean how many decades do I keep trying to fix something before I realize the trying to fix it may be the problem. It's one of those things that I wish I had really understood better when I was a lot younger. And if I had it would have turned my outward search for what would make me fit better in the world, to an inward one of asking, what do I want?

The next step after this is applying that state of being—that thin sliver of sliding into place that feels wrong and so right at the same time, that makes you question your sanity—to your green lights. Feel your way through them instead

But the soul concerns me; and I am beginning to wonder whether it is wise or useful to spend so much time searching for one's own.

I want to read and write and be very quiet.

I felt both puny and pretentious, trying to write in the grandeur of that natural world where everything was older than time and I was the briefest object in the landscape.

She tried, leaning back and closing her eyes, to put in order what she had seen, heard, and what she had known before. She wanted to place her knowledge in paragraphs ( a good opening sentence? she thought), so that it would be easy to handle when she came to write it. But it did not fit in paragraphs and she could not see it, plain and informative, colourful but unimpassioned, on a page. There was no beginning, no middle, no end.

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.

If a cone had dropped on velvet needles, if a star had lain a silver track across the sky, if the dead had turned in their graves - I swear, I would have heard it, that's how silent it all was.

Emma, I want to tell you something about being right: being right is much harder on a person than being wrong.

you have to deal with yourself and your beliefs about life, about people, and about motivation and trust.

Humility is freedom from your own driven ego.

If nothing's working for you, if you feel as though you're pushing forward against the grain, the most productive and proactive thing you can do is nothing. Nature is turning you inward, to gain power through peace, rather than outward to gain power through activity.

I'm a firm believer that ultimately the truth cannot hurt you. It can bring you pain, heartache, and sadness but it cannot destroy the person you are. It can bring you understanding of whom and what you are.

We feel that if someone is bad, he should be burdened with the knowledge that he is bad. It seems to us the ultimate injustice that a person could be evil, by our assessment , and still feel fine about himself.

We are all a little crazy.

recharge my ability to cope with humans at close quarters without losing my mind.

I was tired of pretending to be human. I needed a break.

I try to avoid asking humans if there's anything wrong with them. (Mostly because I don't care.)

I felt this would be the point where a human would sigh, so I sighed.