Quotes About Introspection

She didn't need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn't even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.

Introversion is not something you fix via extroversion. You fix it by seeing it as something not to be fixed. So let introversion exist. Allow those journeys inward as well as outward.

Cuando te quedas demasiado tiempo en un mismo lugar, olvidas lo gigantesco que es el planeta. Pierdes las referencias y dejas de ser consciente de hasta dónde se extienden los paralelos y los meridianos. Del mismo modo, supuso, uno puede ignorar la vastedad interior de las personas

In one life she spent all day arguing with people she didn't know on Twitter and ended a fair proportion of her tweets by saying 'Do better' while secretly realising she was telling herself to do that.

So, do you want to live a life you could be living? Do you want to do something differently? Is there anything you wish to change? Did you do anything wrong?' That was an easy one. 'Yes. Absolutely everything.

She stared at her own window. She thought of herself in her root life, hovering between life and death in her bedroom – equidistant, as it were. And, for the first time, Nora worried about herself as if she was actually someone else. Not just another version of her, but a different actual person. As though finally, through all the experiences of life she now had, she had become someone who pitied her former self. Not in self-pity, because she was a different self now.

never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

She didn't even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.

You gave up the universe for a life on the sofa?' 'I didn't realise that at the time.

Marcelo took a sharp intake of breath, as if the next question was something he had to swim under.

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.

When we take the external clutter away, we have to face the clutter inside ourselves.

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.

self-worth is not found inside the minds of other people.

People often use the word 'despite' in the context of mental illness. So-and-so did such-and-such despite having depression/anxiety/OCD/agoraphobia/whatever. But sometimes that 'despite' should be a 'because'. For instance, I write because of depression. I was not a writer before. The intensity needed - to explore things with relentless curiosity and energy - simply wasn't there.

If one advances confidently," Thoreau had written in Walden, "in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." He'd also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

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.

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.

And, for the first time, Nora worried about herself as if she was actually someone else.

Depression makes thinkers out of all of us.

What we are and what we mean are different things. It's fine. The world makes it very hard not to be a prick.

But where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them. And she realised it was the same with lives.

Fear makes us curious. Sadness makes us philosophize. ("To be or not to be?" is a daily question for many depressives.)

Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself.