Quotes About Introspection

Audie could stare into the distance like he was looking across an ocean, or watching sparks floating above a campfire. He could make a cell seem like it had no walls.

Audie had never been a hater, because when people hate with too much energy it's normally something about themselves they hate the most.

but I have grown accustomed to living alone, having one-sides conversations and arguments with myself that I still manage to lose.

There's plenty of serious stuff that works to cord the muscles of literary merit. But

Maybe that's the fate of someone who spends his life delving into other people's minds – listening to their worst fears, unmasking their flaws and discovering their motives. Maybe a man like that begins to rust or seize up – haunted by too many ghosts in the machine.

she could move Audie, who felt as though he was staring into the depths of a well. All he had to do was fall.

Farley goes quiet. I let the silence build until it fills every corner of the room. It leaks into his ears and his chest and his bladder and his bowels and every dark place in his mind. Very few people are comfortable with silence. It's one thing to be on a plane or in a train carriage or in a waiting room and to ignore those around you, but not when you know someone is expecting you to answer.

In a deep psychological sense, we have no self unless we have a secret. We grab for them whenever we begin losing ourselves in our social group or work or marriage. We reassert our identity as somebody apart.

Every excursion or expedition we take is a story, an inner narrative that we sometimes don't even realise we're following.

Some people will find their own grave too crowded.

I did that," says my memory. "I could not have done that," says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—??the memory yields.

I am neither good, nor bad, neither angel nor devil, I am a man, I am a vampire.

Possessing a theory of mind means that an individual ascribes mental states, such as purpose, intention, knowledge, beliefs, doubts, pretending, liking, and so forth, to himself and to others.

Autobiography is hopelessly inventive.

the library all alone, reading

I spend all my time trying to keep thoughts away and ignore them....But here you are, trying to remember your own life, writing your thoughts down so that you don't forget. I suddenly realized what it would be like not to know, not to remember.

You must learn to heed your senses. Humans use but a tiny percentage of theirs. They barely look, they rarely listen, they never smell, and they think that they can only experience feelings through their skin. But they talk, oh, do they talk.

Reading opens the soul to new journeys.

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great … He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasoning but to err.

The "hypocrite" is the critic who disguises his own failings by focusing attention on the failings of others.

my hope is that whatever it is you decide to believe about whatever subject, you have thought through carefully each of those beliefs and at least tried to make sure that they are your beliefs and not those of your parents. It matters less to me what your specific beliefs are than that you have carefully arrived at your beliefs through reason and evidence and thoughtful reflection.

Oliphant plays with images of windows and mirrors, translucence and opacity, the present and the past.

Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It's equally humbling and uplifting.

It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine (time I had some time alone).