Quotes About Introspection

The silence of not needing to talk. Of just being together, of together-being. The way you could be happily silent with yourself.

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.

I'm not interested in. only or fame. I don't want to be on display like an animal in zoo.

this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish." —James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

Si vous êtes le type de personne qui pense trop aux choses, alors rien n'est plus solitaire au monde que d'être entouré d'un tas de gens qui ne sont pas sur la même longueur d'ondes.

Check your emotional armour is actually protecting you, and not so heavy you can't move.

she'd studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe

In a familiar place, your mind focuses solely on itself. There is nothing new it needs to notice about your bedroom. No potential external threats, just internal ones. By forcing yourself into a new physical space, preferably in a different country, you end up inevitably focusing a bit more on the world outside your head

Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself. Maybe it wasn't the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother's parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place.

Fill-o . . . fill-o-wosso-fee . . .' 'Philosophy?

For all his age and intelligence, Hendrich was fundamentally immature. He was a child. (…) we were just old. And that, in cases such as Hendrich, it didn't really matter how many years (…) had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.

It began to rain again, so she sat there with the blinds open, staring at the drops on the glass.

Nora was only able to think of herself in terms of the things she wasn't.

Life is "understood backward; but it must be lived forward" (Søren Kierkegaard)

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.

So, I thought to myself as I walked away, this is what happens when you live on Earth. You crack. You hold reality in your hands until it burns and then you have to drop the plate.

Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

the point of life is to give yourself to yourself.

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 longitude and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

No. The Book of Regrets is getting lighter. There's a lot of white space in there now . . . It seems that you have spent all your life saying things that you aren't really thinking. This is one of your barriers.' 'Barriers?

You sometimes have to look at what you know is there and discover the things right in front of you. The people you love.

We are the subject in the sentence.

those ever-darkening stairs of the mind

But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,' he said, wisely. 'You're quoting Camus.' 'You got me.