Quotes About Introspection

But this is the slowed-down season held fast by darkness and if no one comes to keep you company then keep watch over your own solitude. In that stillness, you will learn with your whole body the significance of cold and the night, which is otherwise always eluding you. — Patricia Fargnoli, closing lines to "Winter Grace," Winter (Hobblebush Books, 2013)

Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.

I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit—that wouldn't be enough—but like a dead man.

I already know (or believe—which comes to the same thing in my Catholic worldview) that daydreaming doesn't make things up. It sees things. Claims things, twirls them around, takes a good look. Possesses them. Embraces them.Makes something of them. Makes sense. Or music. How restful it is, how full of motion. My first paradox.

Looking not for "a self," that thing modernity keeps saying we're looking for when that is the last thing we need, choking on our individuality. Looking for his mind.

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

head, and then

Am I acting like the person I most want to be? If not, what can I do to act like that person? Answer: Improve (make it a little better), appreciate, connect, or protect. Am I being the partner I want to be? If not, what can I do to be that kind of partner? Answer: Improve (make it a little better), appreciate, connect, or protect.

A woman discovers the way home to herself in a quiet descent into the richness of her own life. In the descent, she reunites with her essential self and natural resources.

Sometimes, what people choose to write down on paper is more important than what they say." Caleb didn't know what Sarah meant. But I knew. I wrote in my journal every night. And when I read what I had written, I could see myself there, clearer than when I looked in the mirror. I could see all of us: Papa, who couldn't always say the things he felt; Caleb, who said everything; and Sarah, who didn't know that she had changed us all.

I, myself, write to change my life, to make it come out the way I want it to. But other people write for other reasons: to see more closely what it is they are thinking about, what they may be afraid of. Sometimes writers write to solve a problem, to answer their own question. All these reasons are good reasons. And that is the most important thing I'll ever tell you. Maybe it is the most important thing you'll ever hear. Ever.

Sometimes poetry--words--give us a small, lovely look at ourselves. And sometimes that is enough.

Sometimes you think you know more than you really do—people, events, things that are true and things that are not. Sometimes you think you know yourself. But then, surprise, it is someone else who shows you what is really there, like the truth a photograph shows.

I must have intuitively known even then, though, that if you ask a certain type of guy about himself, it's as good as winding a wind-up toy.

But sometimes, I hate myself for hating him. Simply because he is an ordinary boy.

I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me.

When I have run out of words to copy, I look out the window at this strange place called India. Inside the train, the people around me are snoring. I don't understand how they can close their eyes when there is so much to see.

If someone looks into your eyes, I read in a book one time, he'll see right into your soul. I didn't want anyone to see into my soul.

We are all wrong at some times and to some degree. A person who claims never to have been wrong is simply a person with a very convenient memory.

All I could do was think. You try doing nothing but thinking for a few months. It's a very useful exercise for shaking some of the chaff out of your life.

You can see a lot of the world from a curb.

to answer . . . is, 'What does a woman want?' Sigmund

It all scares me, and it's all like clothes in a dryer that just keep rolling around in my head from one day to the next.