Quotes About Introspection

Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon.

Did you hear something?" "No." "Did I hear something?" "...I don't know...

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself.

If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.

If getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.

Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.

When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.

One cliché attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely. If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.

You don't have to be an academic. You don't have to be anything. Don't force it. Feel your way, and don't stop feeling your way until something fits. Maybe nothing will. Maybe you are a road, not a destination. That is fine. Be a road. But make sure it's one with something to look at out of the window.

Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.

The weirdest thing about a mind is that you can have the most intense things going on in there but no one else can see them. The world shrugs.

She was a waterfall of apologies. She was drowning in herself.

The key to happiness - or that even more desired thing, calmness - lies not in always thinking happy thoughts. No. That is impossible. No mind on earth with any kind of intelligence could spend a lifetime enjoying only happy thoughts. They key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don't become them. Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person.

Accept feelings and accept that they are just that: feelings.

Continually looking for the meaning of life is like looking for the meaning of toast. It is sometimes better just to eat the toast.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

Reading isn't important because it helps to get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given. It is how humans merge.

I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm sorry for everything. For the past and the future.' An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem.

Read poetry. Especially poetry by Emily Dickinson. It might save you. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.

The price of imagination is pain.

To say how I was feeling would lead to feeling more of what I was feeling.

Do you ever think 'how did I end up here?' Like you are in a maze and totally lost and it's all your fault because you were the one who made every turn?