Quotes About Introspection

There were moments when you idly glanced into the toilet or into a tissue after you'd used it, and suddenly remembered that this, this was what you carried around inside you all the time. This was what was always waiting to be let out.

Now she felt as if she were dully humming with an unpleasant, low-grade drunkenness.

Nor is it simply the small socialist gatherings Joe attends, though he hates to be a joiner, can't stand to be part of a group, even for a cause he believes in like this one, sitting earnest and cross-legged on someone's mildewed carpet and just listening, just taking information in, not offering anything of his own.

mostly they had to take pleasure in the moments that no one else would ever witness.

It's weird," she said, "the way sometimes you're in your life, but other times you're looking back at it like a spectator. It kind of goes back and forth, back and forth." "And then you die." She laughed a little. "Yes. And then you die.

Books light the fire - whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

No one else knew what went on inside you; no one else cared.

He didn't feel the need to have his life figured out. But the truth was that he didn't want to deal with it.

I can't bear the idea of looking deeply. Because you inevitably turn up horrible things.

Later on, when it wasn't just facts that were required, it got so much harder for her. To have to put yourself out there - your opinions, your essence, the particular substance that churned inside you and made you who you were - both exhausted and frightened Greer.

There are some places a person can go where no one else can follow them. And sometimes you just have to trust that they know what they're doing.

Susannah was lonely; I knew that about her, could see it among all the other small trophies of unhappiness that she lined up on triumphant display for me, the way children often do, providing an entire museum of disappointments and inviting the parents in, as if to say: You see? You see how you fucked me up and what it led to? It led to this!

they talked day and night, as though inside them an endless scroll of paper were unraveling out through the mouth.

here I was: shouting compliments about Joe through the mayonnaise-colored living room of my childhood and hoping I would start to believe them.

I don't know,' Greer said to Zee, aware of a kind of familiar vagueness sweeping around her. She sometimes said, 'I don't know,' even when she did know. What she meant was that it was more comfortable to stay in vagueness than to leave it.

The train came, and Jules Jacobson stepped on and thought: I am the loneliest person in this subway car.

To be lost in a novel meant you were not lost in your own life.

We each have only one voice, and the world is so loud. Sometimes I think that the quiet ones have figured out that the best way to get other people's attention is not to shout, but to whisper. Which makes everyone listen a little harder.

The human face had too many possibilities, and they just kept coming in a fast-moving slide show, one after another.

Bobby pins crunching under my feet, I walk through, surveying the damaged girlness.

Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else?

I picture him always like he's looking at us through glass—windshields, sliding patio doors.

My mom always says, you don't have a self until you have a secret.